While the most visible elements of the pos-tindustrial age are the myriad information technologies, the most critical component of this era is not technology per se or even the innovations that give rise to it, but rather the individuals who create its various artifacts. Figure 5 depicts the elements used in assessing a nation’s human resources.
Formal education. The most general measure of human capital is a country’s expenditure on education and its number of educational institutions. Both education expenditures and the number of institutions—private and public—must be dis-aggregated to capture the relative emphasis on primary, secondary, tertiary, and vocational and continuing education