Human Capital Quality And The Regional Economic Growth Disparity

China's economic development has advanced from a high-speed to a high-quality growth stage in recent years. The optimization and upgrading the economic structure require high-quality human capital to support an innovation-driven economy. In this paper, a general equilibrium model of human capital (Xiang and Yeaple, 2018) is applied to estimate the cognitive and non-cognitive human capital productivity based on Chinese provincial-level macro-data and individual labor's micro-data from 2008 to 2017. The weighted power mean of cognitive and non-cognitive productivities helps calculate the provincial level human capital quality index (HCQI), which provides a realistic estimate of human capital quality. We find that the improvement of the HCQI leads to convergence in economic growth in China's provinces. HCQI can help explain the differences in economic growth levels in different regions of China. Our study provides a constructive step in understanding cognitive and non-cognitive abilities and HCQI in China, which could help guide education investment policy in China and its provinces.