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Russia’s Arctic policy focuses on making large-scale progress in the Arctic’s social and economic domains, including the development of local natural resources and the Northern Sea Route and the establishment of high-tech centers that can create global value chains. One of the primary challenges and threats to the sustainable development of the Russian Arctic regions is the mismatch between regional higher education systems and the needs of the economy. The risks are significantly exacerbated by the global economic transformation and the advent of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Therefore, when considering the prospects for the innovation-driven development of the Arctic’s economy, a critical issue is the accumulation of highly educated human capital, where higher education plays a key role. The article explores the issues surrounding the formation and accumulation of human capital from the perspective of regional economic growth. The goal of this work is to empirically test the theory of increasing returns on investments in education. The key premise is that human capital accumulation has constant returns and can therefore grow indefinitely. This made it possible to put forward the hypothesis that the better the population’s access to higher education, the bigger the human capital and, accordingly, the higher the growth of gross output per capita. An empirical assessment was conducted to check the test model of the influence of university enrollment rates on economic growth. The results indicated a high coefficient of determination from the regression of the time series of the studied indicators. Also, the model showed the presence of conditional convergence, which means that a decrease in university enrollment rates is compensated for by an increase in the return on human capital due to an increase in the quality of education.
Sergey A. Agarkov (Tue,) studied this question.