Hakan Acaroğlu

The Effect of Human Capital on Economic Growth: A Time Series Analysis for Turkey

In a globalizing world economy, human capital is the main factor of intensive development for countries which carry out anticipatory investment in human capital. This organizes its advantages for these countries, by creating the best conditions for work and life. An important advantage in creating a stable environment for growth is that the country has the accumulated high-quality human capital, such as education, health, science, management and other fields. The core of human capital, of course, is human beings, but now, the main component is an educated, creative and enterprising individual, with a high level of professionalism. The human capital in the economy determines the main share of the national wealth of country. Therefore, most of all researchers believe human capital is the most valuable resource of the post-industrial society, and it is much more important than natural or accumulated wealth. In all countries, human capital defines the rate of economic development, scientific and technological progress. Accordingly, the public interest in the education and health systems increases. This paper tries to estimate the effect of human capital through education and health on economic growth. The estimation is conducted by a Cobb-Douglas production function, in which labor, human capital, and physical capital are shown as factors of production. The Cobb-Douglas production function is preferred by time series data on education, health, physical capital, labor and economic growth for the period of 1960–2011 of Turkey. The period is divided into five sub-divisions, series 1: 1960–1980, series 2: 1981–2001, series 3: 1981–2011, series 4: 2002–2011, and series 5: 1960–2011.The findings indicate a positive impact of human capital on economic growth for both health and education. In addition, health policies were much more effective in the period of 2002–2011. The policies should be continued in the health sector for a sustainable development. But in order to attain a higher level of benefits from human capital, it is necessary to implement effective economic policies related to the education expenditures.

Is There a Necessity for an Alternative Energy Source Instead of Natural Gas in the Industrial Sector of Turkey

This paper examines the causality relationship between natural gas consumption in industry sector and industrial growth within Granger causality technique and ARDL (autoregressive distributed lagged) model, testing for the period of 1976–2013 in Turkey. We have three main factors to choose this subject as a study. First of all, energy is a vital production factor related to economic growth. Secondly, because of industrial sector is one of the main sector in developing countries and Turkey is one of the developing countries in the world, industry takes the priority in our research. Lastly, natural gas is the most used primary energy source at industry. During analyzing these three factors, we tried to find the answer of necessity of an alternative energy sources at industry in Turkey. According to results, it is found that there is no causality relationship between natural gas consumption in industry sector and economic growth. As a conclusion, we offer an economic policy that, Turkey should find an alternative energy sources to continuing its growth.