Human Capital Investment

This report clarifies what is now known about human capital and how it can be measured.

Examines the ways in which expenses for secondary education determine whether parents will enroll their children in primary schools.

How are human capital investments allocated between women and men? What are the returns to investments in women's nutrition, health care, education, mobility, and training? In thirteen wide-ranging and innovative empirical analyses, Investment in Women's Human Capital explores the nature of human capital distributions to women and their effect on outcomes within the family. Section I considers the experiences of high-income countries, examining the limitations of industrialization for the advancement of women; returns to secondary education for women; and state control of women's education and labor market productivity through the design of tax systems and the public subsidy of children. The remaining four sections investigate health, education, household structure and labor markets, and measurement issues in low-income countries, including the effect of technological change on transfers of wealth to and from children in India; women's and men's responses to the costs of medical care in Kenya; the effects of birth order and sex on educational attainment in Taiwan; wage returns to schooling in Indonesia and in Cote d'Ivoire; and the increasing prevalence of female-headed households and the correlates of gender differences in wages in Brazil.

Human capital theory, or the notion that there is a direct relationship between educational investment and individual and national prosperity, has dominated public policy on education and labor for the past fifty years. In The Death of Human Capital?, Phillip Brown, Hugh Lauder, and Sin Yi Cheung argue that the human capital story is one of false promise: investing in learning isn't the road to higher earnings and national prosperity. Rather than abandoning human capital theory, however, the authors redefine human capital in an age of smart machines. They present a new human capital theory that rejects the view that automation and AI will result in the end of waged work, but see the fundamental problem as a lack of quality jobs offering interesting, worthwhile, and rewarding opportunities. A controversial challenge to the reigning ideology, The Death of Human Capital? connects with a growing sense that capitalism is in crisis, felt by students and the wider workforce, shows what's at stake in the new human capital while offering hope for the future.

The work world is changing faster than ever before. Adapting to this new reality without a significant interruption in results is increasingly a top priority for all businesses. The key to thriving through disruption is understanding and practicing human capital strategies that will drive enterprise performance and value-creation. In Humanizing Human Capital, renowned business thought leaders Solange Charas, PhD, and Stela Lupushor reframe traditional HR practices into a future-forward strategy to optimize human capital. Charas and Lupushor shift decision-making about people from a gut sense to an evidence-based approach—a critical and much-needed departure from the cross-your-fingers-and-hope-for-the-best approach of most traditional HR programs today. Humanizing Human Capital reveals a step-by-step method to apply analytics approaches to human capital while anticipating inevitable changes in the workforce landscape. This will enable human capital professionals to generate positive outcomes for all stakeholders and allow management to make decisions that work for the entire enterprise. With this book’s comparison of “traditional” with the “future-forward” approach to human capital management, case studies, real-world situations, and 20 business principles, you will learn to: Adopt a best-evidence versus best-practice approach to decision making Shift your thinking so that you view human capital as a crucial investment rather than as a sunk cost Identify what needs to change to respond to future pressures and apply critical thinking to create workable solutions Balance human capital analytics with the more human-centric elements of people management Equip yourself with approaches and tools to interpret the collective voice of the workforce Utilize methods to measure and optimize human capital efficiency, increasing your ROI Increase value for all key stakeholders, including investors, management, workers, customers, partners, and the community at large The road ahead may seem unpredictable and even treacherous, but Humanizing Human Capital provides leaders of any organization a new framework to create resilient, responsive, and innovative organizations with tangible and sustainable business results.

Investment in human capital is to the fore of debate and analysis in OECD countries about how to promote economic prosperity, fuller employment, and social cohesion. Individuals, organisations and nations increasingly recognise that high levels of know

The idea of viewing individuals’ knowledge and abilities as an asset—as human capital—can be traced back to the work of Adam Smith in the 18th century. But human capital is intangible, and hence hard to define and measure. Increasingly, however, policymakers are calling for ways to understand and quantify human capital, in order to better understand what drives economic growth and the functioning of labour markets, to assess the long-term sustainability of a country’s development path, and to measure the output and productivity performance of the educational sector. Devising a robust methodology for the monetary valuation of the stock of human capital is especially important as studies suggest that human capital is by far the most important component of the total capital stock in most advanced economies. This Guide on Measuring Human Capital discusses conceptual, methodological and implementation issues and challenges. The recommendations are a first attempt to come up with a way to estimate and record the role of human capital in a way that is aligned with the principles of the national accounts and that is comparable across economies.