Are timss scores suitable proxies for nations’ human capital?

Abstract

To express human capital of nations proxies, such as literacy rates, school-enrollment rates or years of schooling are used. The aim of this article is to explore another possibility: to relate country’s human capital to its outcome in TIMSS (The Third International Mathematics and Science Study), large international study of students’ achievements in mathematics and science literacy from 1995. The relationship between TIMSS scores and GDP growth during 2000-2010 and GDP per capita in 2010 is examined and TIMSS are compared with other proxies of human capital, namely primary, secondary and tertiary school-enrollment rates from 1990, 1995 and 2000. The main result is that the correlation between TIMSS scores and GDP per capita in 2010 is statistically significant at α = 0.01 level, and this relationship is stronger than that for school-enrollment rates. Also, linear models explaining GDP growth with TIMSS were found more statistically significant than models without TIMSS. These results indicate that TIMSS scores might be considered a suitable proxy for nations’ human capital after one or one and a half decade.