Izabella Szakálné Kanó (p), Éva Kazemi-Sánta, Imre Lengyel

Human capital investment means that people use education and training as tools to increase their productivity. Methods which are used to measure these investments can be divided basically into two groups. Approaches of the first group focus on pecuniary factors of human capital. In the second group we find methods that measure output and performance of education system. We follow thread of the second group and measure human capital and its regional distribution using data on tertiary educated population.
Human capital is playing an important role in regional development and regional growth. Formal education and its externalities influence growth by accumulating human capital (Romer 1990) and majority of them is not linked to market processes (McMahon, 2000). These externalities affect several factors of well-being, like health, longer lifetime expectations, lower infant mortality, lower crime rates and political stability.
Former studies showed that educational level of Hungarian population was steadily increasing after 1990, and also a territorial levelling process could be observed. Our research questions are
a) Which regional level was playing the most important role in the territorial equalizing process of tertiary educated population?
b) Can we detect any neighbourhood effect of higher education institutions on rate of tertiary educated population?
In our analysis we use an entropy-like index and Gini index to measure extent of the levelling process, and Local Moran index and Eigenvector Spatial Filtering method to answer our research questions.
Preliminary results show, that settlement level (LAU2) equalization process was a result of (1) the settlement level equalizing process inside of subregions (LAU1) and (2) county level (NUTS3) equalizing process inside of regions (NUTS2). We also conclude, that higher education institutions have a huge influence on their environment.

McMahon, W. W. (2000). The Measurement of Externalities, Non-Market Effects, and Trends in the Returns to Education. In E. I. B. OECD (Ed.), The Appraisal of Investments In Educational Facilitries. Paris: OECD.
Romer, P. M. (1990). Endogenous Technological Change. Part 2: The Problem of Development: A Conference of the Institute for the Study of Free Enterprise Systems: The Journal of Political Economy. Vol. 98, pp. S71-S102

Ana Paula Bastos (p), Mauricio Serra, Danilo Fernandes, Master Carlos Xavier, Master Iris Castro

The role of universities in the development of nations and, consequently, in the regions where they are inserted, is indisputable. The contemporary consensus is that innovation is one of the determinants of development and that its basis lies in science, technology and education. Cooke, Uranga and Etxebarria (1998), present relevant work demonstrating the role of the regional context for science, knowledge and innovation. If in more central regions of the globe this relationship is widely studied, in peripheral regions, with less dissemination of information there is still a long way to trace, until this link is proved. However, it is believed that higher education institutions, in addition to their teaching and research missions, must adapt to new demands by placing greater emphasis on the so-called "third mission" (Serra & Rolim, 2013). The communities in which they are inserted expect this openness to occur and put great expectations in this pushing role of universities into local development. Here we analyse data from the largest teacher training program outside the university infrastructure in Brazil. Federal University of Pará (UFPA) is present in Amazon´s basin remote areas and we investigate its role both in this program and on local expectations for stopping its isolated status. National data showed that the teacher’s training gap and the content to be taught would be greater in the Northern region of the country. Given the importance of this training to raise the knowledge levels of the country, the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES), together with Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) throughout Brazil, has shaped a national teacher’s training program. The case study of this article is the UFPA, which stands out in the numbers of trainees and proposed to form them in all corners of the State. The effects can not yet be fully measured since the program started in 2009, but there are trends of undeniable importance for the development of the region.

Giorgio Fazio (p), Enza Maltese, Davide Piacentino

Social capital is considered beneficial for many different aspects of society, not least educational outcomes. For example, Coleman (1988) investigates the relationship between social capital and human capital, focusing on the effects of the former on high school dropout. In particular, he argues that the combination of social capital in the family and in the community aids in the formation of human capital reducing the probability of dropout. More recently, Dufur, Parcel and Troutman (2013) examine the different effects of social capital created at home and at school on students’ academic achievements. Similarly, Behtoui and Neergaard (2015) look at the impact of social capital on the educational outcomes of young people in Sweden, with a focus on the extra-familial aspects of social capital, finding that they positively influence the educational performance of pupils.

In line with this literature, in this paper we investigate the effects of civic values on educational achievement. In order to perform this investigation, we exploit an extensive survey, conducted in cooperation with the local school authorities and involving a large cohort of students enrolled in the second year of secondary schools in the Southern Italian city of Palermo. In the empirical analysis, we use multilevel models to evaluate the relative impact of parental involvement, peers and spatial effects on education achievement. Our results seem to indicate that the influence of parental values boosts the probability of success of children, but, at the same time, this probability remains characterized by a significant degree of spatial heterogeneity.