Based on the empirical investigations and theory of endogenous growth, this paper examines the role of human capital on economic growth from 118 countries over period from 1980 to 2006. The first part of this paper classifies the education into primary、secondary and tertiary ones to test whether each educational level affect economic growth differently, and attempt to uncover this different effect among different countries development. Then, we focus on the composition of human capital that be categorized into agriculture(agriculture), industry(science, manufacture), service(art, humanity, health, society, service) types to find which types of human capital has the greatest impact to economic growth and add the factor of country’s industrial structure to test whether the growth effect of education depends on the coordination between country’s education fields and its’ industrial structure of local economics.

Empirical result indicates three conclusions. First, tertiary education has the greatest contribution to economic growth for all countries development. In particular, the less-developed nations need more tertiary human capital to catch up with the well-developed ones. Second, we find out that only the industry skill has positive contribution to economic growth. Finally, as including the factor of development and industrial organization, the human capital of industry skill only in developing countries, and the nations with highly-profession guiding in industry has significant growth effect.

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