Average Years of Education in Hungary: Annual Estimates, 1920-2006

The average years of education, an indicator of the average educational attainment in a population, is a widely used proxy of human capital stock in the empirical literature. Its application is somewhat limited by data availability, even though annual series have already been created for a few countries. This paper offers an annual series of the average years of education in Hungary between 1920 and 2006, estimated by a version of the Barro-Lee (2001) methodology modified to correct the systematic bias arising from the assumption that mortality and educational attainment are uncorrelated. Using the new series, we also carry out a simple growth-accounting exercise and find that human capital accumulation was a major determinant of economic growth in Hungary, though only in the 1990s.