Learning Strategies in Modelling Economic Growth

Abstract

Modern theories of economic growth recognize human capital as the main factor of growth. Strong investments of countries in education and research are justified by this fact. However, there are few studies analyzing the interaction between the development of human capital and the economic growth of countries. In particular, it is difficult to find in the modern literature papers that model growth economics with learning strategies and generally this works take human capital as exogenous to the model. In this paper we introduce in the very well known model of Romer (1990) (see also version in Romer (1996)) a modification to obtain a model of economic growth with learning strategies (see Bustillos and Oliveira (2004), Mingfeng et al. (2006) and Penna (1995), Huang and Stauffer (2001), Maksymowicz et al. (2008), Mingfeng et al. (2006), Oliveira (1998), Pan et al. (2005), Penna (1995), Stauffer (2007) ). In particular, we applied a version of the Bustillos and Oliveira model to a model of economic growth depending on knowledge. We explain that economic growth is determined by two ways of learning: 1)"individual learning": individual cumulates knowledge by interacting with its natural environment, in a process of trial-and error; 2) "social learning": individuals spending time near another ("teacher") can learn and cumulate knowledge. We analyze the model conducting simulations, obtaining implication of economic policy.

Keywords: Economic Growth, Learning Strategies, Human Capital