Date : 31 March 2026 (Tuesday)
Time : 10:00am- 1:00pm
Format : Face-to-face
Venue : Room 532, 5/F, The Jockey Club Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU
Registration : https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_hdetail.aspx?guest=Y&ueid=105688

Abstract:
This lecture examines the long-run evolution of education and human capital investment as central institutions shaping economic growth, inequality, and structural transformation. Drawing on two newly constructed historical datasets with national and global coverage, it documents how persistent differences in the level, composition, and sequencing of human capital investment have contributed to divergent development paths across countries and regions.

The lecture first turns to a comparative historical analysis of human capital accumulation in China and India over the twentieth century. Using a newly constructed dataset combining historical records and educational statistics from 1900 to 2020, this study examines how contrasting education strategies—shaped by institutional choices and policy priorities—produced markedly different distributions of skills and long-run development paths.

The lecture then broadens the perspective from a comparative country analysis to a global historical framework. The second study introduces a new worldwide database on public expenditure and revenue from 1800 to 2025, with a particular focus on education and health spending. It documents the long-run rise of human capital investment across all regions, alongside large and persistent inequalities in human capital investment, and examines their implications for productivity growth and global divergence.

About the speaker:

Li Yang / 杨利 is an Advanced Researcher at ZEW – Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research. He is also a research fellow of the World Inequality Lab at the Paris School of Economics.

Previously, he was a researcher in the World Bank DEC research group in Washington D.C. from 2013 to 2017, a Marie Curie research fellow at Paris School of Economics from 2018 to 2020. He was also the coordinator for East and South Asia at the World Inequality Lab from 2018 to 2021.

His main research interests pertain to income and wealth inequality, economic history and political economy. His research output has been published in leading scientific journals in both economics and sociology such as American Economic Review, Journal of Economic Growth, Journal of Public Economics, World Development, the World Bank Economic Review, European Journal of Political Economy and the British Journal of Sociology. Owing to their relevance for ongoing public debates, his findings have also widely been discussed in diverse media outlets, such as the Economist, Foreign Affairs, Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, etc.

Li Yang received his PhD in Economics in 2019 from Xiamen University, China.
Google site: https://sites.google.com/view/lyang/

For enquiries, please contact Mr. Sam Lee at snslee@hku.hk.