Openness, Human Capital and Economic Growth in MENA: Theoretical foundations and application to Dynamic panel data

Several econometrical recent studies carried on international comparison data puts into question the opinion according to which education as a human capital indicator would encourage growth. This result comes in a context of opening to the outside. The evaluations are made on data of dynamic panel with the generalized moment's method GMM, with a tertiary schooling rate as indicator reflecting the human capital. This human capital coefficient varies stochastically from a country to the other according to national features. Several among them permit to explain these differences of quality: educational infrastructures, capacity to provide education in an equal way, initial endowment in human capital in case of opening. We introduce several variables related to the structural, institutional features and to the development of the human capital to test their effects on growth in the M.E.N.A zone during the period 1994-2006. Most of the found results show the existence of a relation between the policies of opening, structural, institutional, human capital factors and the growth in these countries.