The main human capital influencing factors. Romanian case

The paper intends to identify and investigate the main determinants of human capital in Romania by comparing its evolution with other high performing countries belonging to the same region, considered from a socio-economic point of view. Using data originating from the Penn World Tables and the World Bank’s data basis, a series of graphs will be generated in order to provide some valuable and relevant insights for input and output variables connected to human capital. The input variables taken into account consist of government expenditure and investments dedicated especially to health and education. The output variables are found, on one hand, in high-tech exports considered as a percent of total exports and correspondingly on the life expectancy at birth, on the other hand. During the last twenty years, it had been noticed that overall human capital levels have experienced constant improvements in the European Union. However, for the purpose of comparison, the study includes only countries that have joined the European Union in one of the last three admission waves. Out of these waves, outstanding results had been observed in the case of Croatia and Slovakia, countries which will be used as future benchmarks for analyzing Romania’s human capital levels. We expect to validate based on our research an already established positive correlation between governmental spending and investments dedicated to human capital, correlation that had been highlighted by other similar relevant previous studies. Moreover, the current research study intends to bring forward a way to measure and evaluate the public spending efficiency with respect to human capital and next to evaluate it against other output relevant indicators.