RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN EDUCATION AND ECONOMIC GROWTH: A COMPARATIVE STUDY BETWEEN ROMANIA AND POLAND

Through this paper, we aim to address a topic whose origins date back to the 1960s, when the economist Theodore W. Schultz laid the foundations of human capital theory and argued that: if both physical capital and human capital develop together, then economic capital can also grow (T.R. Breton, 2014). In line with this statement, the present study aims to highlight the extent to which certain indicators, closely related to education, are connected to a country's economic growth. Our analysis will focus on two Eastern European countries that have undergone a period of both economic and social transition, namely Romania and Poland. The main hypothesis from which we start our research is that the educational component of human capital has a positive relationship with economic growth. Thus, in the first part of the paper, we will present a comparative overview of the values for the selected indicators of education and economic growth for both countries. Subsequently, we will test two more auxiliary hypotheses, based on the primary one, through simple linear regression models, which will provide some interesting perspectives.