How higher education institutions contribute to the growth in regions of Europe?

Abstract

Various studies show that higher education institutions contribute to regional economic development by R&D, creation of human capital, knowledge and technology transfer, and by creation of a favourable milieu. It is brought out that the basic procedure is to sum expenditures of the college community (students, faculty, staff and visitors) created by the presence of the institution and apply multipliers to account for the interdependency of economic activity in a local economy, resulting in an estimated ‘local economic impact'. The aim of the paper is to investigate the relationship between students in tertiary education and economic growth in NUTS 2 level in Europe from 1998 to 2008 by looking whether the share of tertiary students (measuring human capital) is correlated with the share of knowledge-intensive employment (KIE) in different regions. The increase in KIE is related to increasing levels of GDP per capita and R&D expenditures. Taking into account regional-level fixed effects, the share of tertiary students is not statistically significant. We found out that the increase in KIE is related to increasing levels of GDP per capita and R&D expenditures. The share of students five periods ago has a positive relation with the KIE: as we assumed, it takes time for the human capital to contribute to the economic development.

Keywords:

• education
• economic growth
• NUTS 2
• university–industry cooperation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Our analysed time period is limited to 2008. Because of the change in NACE (Statistical Classification of Economic Activities in the European Community, Nomenclature statistique des activités économiques dans la Communauté européenne) classification, KIS vary across NACE Rev. 1.1 and NACE Rev. 2 and are therefore not comparable over time.