Personal Capital and Emotional Intelligence: An Increasingly Important Intangible Source of Economic Growth

Abstract

This paper focuses on a new source of economic growth, personal capital formation, and provides an explanation for a part of economic growth that has heretofore been unexplained. Personal capital is the human capacity reflecting the quality of an individual's psychological, physical, and spiritual functioning; it is a capacity fundamentally different from cognitive ability. Spending effort to improve emotional intelligence, often in order to improve job performance, is the essence of what successful investment in personal capital involves. Given the increasing investment in it and the evidence of its importance, economists can no longer afford to neglect the contribution of personal capital to economic growth.Economic Growth; Growth