Human capital in Spain: an estimate of educational attainment

Abstract

In this article an alternative methodology is proposed for obtaining long time-series data for a human capital indicator based on the average number of years of education of the working-age population. In contrast to previous studies, we use Labour Force Survey microdata relating to the level of education actually completed, in order to construct temporal profiles of educational attainment and thus avoid the need to interpolate from censuses. To illustrate the method proposed, we evaluate the average number of years of education of the Spanish working-age population for the period 1910 to 2000.

Acknowledgements

The authors are very grateful to an anonymous referee and the editor for useful comments and suggestions on a previous draft of this article. Financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology (SEC2002-01892) is also gratefully acknowledged. The views expressed here are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the institutions with which they are affiliated.

Notes

¹ León-Gonzalez and Montolio (2004) examined the role of human capital measure as determinant of economic growth for the Spanish provinces, using data elaborated by the IVIE.

² See, for example, Gisbert (2003) for an empirical use of the Barro-Lee (1996) data set on educational attainment.

³ See Serrano (1999, 2003) for an empirical assessment on the effect of human capital using both the Barro–Lee (1996) and De la Fuente-Domenech (2001) data sets.

⁴ A comprehensive review of the history of Spain's education system can be found in Delgado (1994).

⁵ In line with Delgado (1994), the reason for including 1 year for illiteracy is that there is broad evidence suggesting that a substantial number of people stated, they were illiterate when entering military service or in the population census, despite the fact that they had attended school, albeit not regularly and had learned to read and write, skills they had then forgotten through lack of daily use.