Human capital, productivity and physical capital are considered the main factors in the economies' GDP per capita determination. According to the neoclassical approach, human capital accumulation explains about a third of the variation in per capita income across countries. However, there is no consensus on the ways in which human capital influences GDP per capita. The present study's goal is to compare two production functions functional forms for the Brazilian States: the one developed by Solow (1956) and the one developed by Mincer (1974). The marginal return of education also has been estimated and we have analyzed the relevance of human capital on GDP per capita determination through a variety of estimation methods, for the 1980-2002 period. The empirical results rejected the neoclassical specification with human capital in favor of the mincerian's specification. The estimated marginal return of education is 15% and the empirical findings support the theory that states that human capital is one of the main factors affecting income level.
human capital; economic growth; mincerian production function; return of education
