Human Capital Development and Economic Growth in Southern African Customs Union Member States

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Abstract

This study focused on investigating the relationship between human capital development and economic growth in five Southern African Customs Union (SACU) member states, indicating Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, South Africa, and Eswatini, for the period 1990 to 2020. The study used the panel autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) for the analysis. The empirical result shows that total government expenditure on health, gross fixed capital formation, and population growth rate have a positive impact on the gross domestic product of SACU countries over the study period, except for total government expenditure on education, which exhibits a significant inverse relationship. The policy recommendation that emerges from the study is that, with the negative impact of government expenditure on education on GDP, the government should ensure proper management of education projects to avoid embezzlement of funds and adequate financing of the education sector to enable quality growth in the economy.