Human capital as an element of sustainable development in the NUTS 2 regions of Central and Eastern Europe

The objectives of this study are: to construct composite measures of human capital and of the three SD pillars: economic, social and environmental; to analyse their regional differentiation; to estimate the impact of human capital on the level of each of the SD pillars. The analysis covers NUTS 2 regions of the CEE countries in the year 2022. A measure of human capital was constructed adopting the Local HDI approach. The indicators of the SD pillars were constructed as geometric means of diagnostic variables. A SUR model was used to estimate the impact of human capital on the level of each pillar. The estimation results indicated a strong effect of human capital on the economic and social pillars and a much weaker effect on the environmental pillar. A significant impact of EU membership on the social and environmental pillars was also found.