Are TIMSS Scores Suitable Proxies for Nations´ Human Capital?

To express human capital of nations proxies, such as literacy rates, school-enrollment rates or years of schooling are used. The aim of this article is to explore another possibility: to relate country´s human capital to its outcome in TIMSS (The Third International Mathematics and Science Study), large international study of students´ achievements in mathematics and science literacy from 1995. The relationship between TIMSS scores and GDP growth during 2000-2010 and GDP per capita in 2010 is examined and TIMSS are compared with other proxies of human capital, namely primary, secondary and tertiary school-enrollment rates from 1990, 1995 and 2000. The main result is that the correlation between TIMSS scores and GDP per capita in 2010 is statistically significant at α = 0.01 level, and this relationship is stronger than that for school-enrollment rates. Also, linear models explaining GDP growth with TIMSS were found more statistically significant than models without TIMSS. These results indicate that TIMSS scores might be considered a suitable proxy for nations´ human capital after one or one and a half decade.