The Relationship Between Technological Progress and Human Capital Development: Regional Comparison in China

The education expansion efforts have shown positive developments in China, nevertheless, the increasing disparities among the eastern, central, western, and northeastern regions pose the concern whether technological advancements support the development of human capital. This paper utilized unbalanced panel data from China’s 262 prefecture-level cities between the years 2010 and 2023 to explore the association between TIC and Human Capital, and to build an econometric model for the empirical test: the econometric model mainly applies the two-way fixed effects model to deal with the influences of the intercity heterogeneity and time trends. The results of the correlation analysis matrix show that the correlation between variables is, in general, remarkable and wide-ranging, reflecting the essential issues that are influential to the capacities of urban innovation and the intrinsic relationship between them. The results suggest that policies promoting innovation are likely to be more effective when coordinated with urban development and education-related conditions that jointly shape human capital accumulation.