Education and Italian regional development

Given recent emphasis on externality to education, macroeconomic studies have a role to play in the analysis of return to schooling. In this paper we study the connection between growth and human capital in a convergence regression for the panel of Italian regions. We include measures of average, primary, secondary and tertiary education. We find that increased education seems to contribute to growth only in the South. Decomposing total schooling into its three constituent parts, we find that only primary education in the South seems to be important. The results thus suggest that the Italian growth benefited from the elimination of illiteracy in the South, mainly in the 1960s, but not from the substantial increases in education at the other levels.