Human capital in the manufacturing sector from 1972 to 2015 and its association with economic growth of Pakistan

The manufacturing sector has been a large contribution towards promoting economic growth, generating employment, competitiveness and trade development in the world. Human capital plays a significant role in the growth of the manufacturing sector, while its determination on manufacture sector growth in Pakistan has remained unexplored in literature. The main objective of this study is to define the proxy role of human capital formation (e.g., secondary school enrolment, infant mortality rate, and life expectancy) and their direct impact on manufacturing sectors in Pakistan for the period of 1972-2015. An autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) bounds testing approach was applied to investigate and co-integrate the causality link between the study variables. These tests put a spotlight on the long-run connection among the variables, while in addition, the results revealed that human capital, employed labor force, gross fixed capital formation, inflation rate, energy consumption, tax on GDP, domestic credit had a positive impact on the manufacturing growth in Pakistan. (C) 2019 The Authors. Published by IASE.