Human Development European City Index: Methodology And Results

Knowledge externalities are considered by the Intellectual Capital Outlook as generator of long-term wealth. In this scenario, human capital has a key role in the local development. In this paper, we propose a novel methodology to determine the human development capacities of knowledge cities supported by a composite index of intangible factors of human resources. In this sense, we estimated a human capital index that covers two resources (individual and social conditions) and seven dimensions with 31 indicators from the urban audit database. We built a European cities ranking to 158 cities from 24 countries. The results show the growth of a new 4gap of divergence. Cities are competing for the attraction of wealth in a divergent scenario, in which human capital is the component that opens the diverging gap between them