China’s Human Capital Project

The research project, “China’s Human Capital: Measurement and Index Construction,” is conducted by the China Center for Human Capital and Labor Research Center (CHLR), and funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the Central University of Finance and Economics.

The project aims at establishing China’s first scientific and systematic human capital index, quantitatively describing China’s human capital distribution, trend and dynamics. It constructs important measurements for further evaluating human capital and its contribution to economic development, and provides policy-makers with important information on the nation’s human capital development.

The project is part of the international effort to establish comparable national human capital measurement across nations and to eventually incorporate human capital into the National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA) system.

The project is led by Professor Haizheng Li, Professor of Economics at Georgia Institute of Technology. The research team includes Professor Barbara Fraumeni (a pioneer scholar in developing the Jorgenson-Fraumeni method of human capital calculation), other full-time and special-term professors, graduate students, and administrative staff at the CHLR. Since the inaugural issue of the China Human Capital Report in 2009, the project has generated great social impact, and drawn the attention of academia and governments both at home and abroad.