Human Capital - Papel

Human capital is the stock of competencies, knowledge and personality attributes embodied in the ability to perform labor so as to produce economic value. It is the attributes gained by a worker through education and experience. [1] Many early economic theories refer to it simply as workforce, one of three factors of production, and consider it to be a fungible resource -- homogeneous and easily interchangeable. Other conceptions of this labor dispense with these assumptions.

Contents
1 Background
2 Origin of the term
3 Competence and capital
4 Marxist analysis
5 Importance of Human Capital
6 Cumulative Growth of Human Capital
7 Debates about the concept
8 Mobility between nations
9 Classification
10 Risk
11 See also
12 Notes
13 References
14 External links


[edit] BackgroundJustin Slay defined four types of fixed capital (which is characterized as that which affords a revenue or profit without circulating or changing masters). The four types were:

1.useful machines, instruments of the trade;
2.buildings as the means of procuring revenue;
3.improvements of land;
4.the acquired and useful abilities of all the inhabitants or members of the society.
Adam Smith defined human capital as follows:

“Fourthly, of the acquired and useful abilities of all the inhabitants or members of the society. The acquisition of such talents, by the maintenance of the acquirer during his education, study, or apprenticeship, always costs a real expense, which is a capital fixed and realized, as it were, in his person. Those talents, as they make a part of his fortune, so do they likewise that of the society to which he belongs. The improved dexterity of a workman may be considered in the same light as a machine or instrument of trade which facilitates and abridges labor, and which, though it costs a certain expense, repays that expense with a profit.”.[2]

Therefore, Smith argued, the productive power of labor are both dependent on the division of labor:...