Implications of Human Capital Analysis in Tourism

Importance of the issue Even though Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations had already pointed out the importance of human capital as an explanatory factor of growth, there is no doubt that in the last forty years the economic theory has improved outstandingly its understanding of the role of human capital in economic development. From the first studies of Shultz (1960, 1961), an important part of the economic growth literature has focused on the effects of human capital on productivity. Starting with Solow (1957), an important part of the research dealing with growth accounting has tried to explain the determinants of growth apart from raw labour and capital accumulation. In some of the main papers on the issue (Griliches 1970, 1977; Kendrick 1976, 1994), human capital has been identified as one of the explanatory elements of the Solow residual ‘black box’. From a theoretical perspective, the proposal of Lucas (1988) has turned into a benchmark in the modelisation of human capital accumulation as the driving force of economic development. In fact, many of the new theories of growth are based on the existence of externalities in education (Topel 1998). From the microeconomic perspective, Gary Becker is considered to be the father of the contemporary human capital economic literature. The goal of these studies is the analysis of individual, family and social investment decisions in human capital and their policy implications. The topics under consideration are, among others, the relationship between individual demand for education and the supply of educated labour, the variance in earnings that can be explained through differences in the components of human capital endowments as education, on-the-job training, experience, migration or health, and the connection between them and labour productivity. During the last decades, an important increase in the average level of human capital has taken place in all developed economies. This has put the analysis of human capital issues at the forefront of labour studies. As