Event Details:

Date : 27 May 2026 (Wed)
Time : 11am-12:30pm
Format : Hybrid
Venue : Room 533, 5/F, The Jockey Club Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU
Registration : https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_hdetail.aspx?guest=Y&ueid=106777

Abstract:

This paper constructs a new database on public expenditure and revenue and their components, particularly education and health expenditure, covering all world regions over the 1800–2025 period. Human capital expenditure has grown substantially, but with large and persistent inequalities. Public education expenditure per school-age individual in Sub-Saharan Africa is about 3% of the level observed in Europe and North America in 2025 at purchasing power parity, compared to 6% in 1980 and 4% in 1950. Human capital expenditure strongly correlates with productivity growth, especially for public education and in poor countries. Estimated returns from our macro-historical database are around 10%, in line with micro studies. Finally, we present simulations based on illustrative human capital expenditure trajectories over the 2025–2100 period. In particular, we analyze the conditions under which convergence in human capital expenditure could lead to global productivity convergence by 2100.

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/