Purpose: Might a country’s economic growth performance differ depending on the evolution of its human capital? This paper aims to consider education as a channel for human capital improvement and then for economic growth. The authors hypothesize the existence of a threshold for education, after which point the characteristics of economic growth change.Design/methodology/approach: To address this question, the authors turn from a linear framework to a nonlinear one by applying smooth transition specifications.Findings: This empirical analysis for Spain points to the existence of nonlinearities in the relationship between education and economic growth at country level, for both secondary and tertiary education. Next, as different patterns emerge in different regions, the authors provide a regional analysis for a number of representative Spanish regions. The results show that both secondary and tertiary education matter for economic growth and that nonlinearities in this relationship should be taken into account.Practical implications: What is learnt from using Smooth Transition Regression models for the education-economic growth link is that the educational level of the population can be understood as a source of nonlinearities in the economic activity of a country (and of a region). Thus, depending on national and regional educational levels, economic growth behaves differently.Originality/value: Although the importance of nonlinearities has been identified, linearity is usually assumed in this field of the literature. This paper calls into question the linearity assumption by using time series techniques for 1971-2013 in Spain, an OECD country, and testing whether the results at country level hold for different regions within Spain as a robustness check.

In this article, we aim at modelling the long-run behaviour of the Real Effective Exchange Rates (REER) for a pool of African countries. Not much attention has been paid to this group of countries, in particular, to the existence of nonlinearities in the long-run path of such a variable. Controlling for two sources of nonlinearities, i.e. asymmetric adjustment to equilibrium and nonlinear deterministic trends allows us to gain some insight about the behaviour of the African REER. We find that these sources of nonlinearities help us to explain the apparent unit root behaviour found applying linear unit root tests for most of the countries.

How are higher education organizations going to cope with the challenges of a society that is continuously changing? Although the education sector needs to adapt to technological and socioeconomic changes, methodologies on which we have relied in the past will not be adequate in the future. In fact, the past represents just one of an infinite number of possible outcomes and the future may involve a completely different framework. As a consequence, we should attempt to identify an appropriate technique for analyzing higher education in the future.This paper aims to identify the advances and new trends that will allow the definition of a new model for higher education. A crucial paradox is also outlined: whether the witnessed never-before-seen democratization in the accessibility to higher education is going to co-exist in the future with a possible scenario that might restrict its access because of increasing competition and concentration of higher education organizations.We posit that the quantum approach to time and change (QATC) is a suitable approach that helps to set out the future scenario where the current educational model will be called into question; it is also a key tool for studying the relationship between higher education and society