Thaindian News

London, March 20 (IANS) An analysis of test scores from 90 countries found that the intelligence of the smartest five percent made a big contribution to the strength of their economies.

In the last 50 years or so, economists have started taking an interest in the value of human capital. That means all the qualities of the people who make up the workforce.

Heiner Rindermann, of the Chemnitz University of Technology (Germany), wanted to look more closely at human capital, and particularly the factor that psychologists call cognitive ability, the journal Psychological Science reports.

“In other words, it’s the ability of a person to solve a problem in the most efficient way - not with violence, but by thinking,” Rindermann says. He wrote the study with James Thompson of University College London.

They collected information on 90 countries, including far-off lands from the US to New Zealand and Colombia to Kazakhstan, according to a Chemnitz University statement.

They also collected data on the country’s excellence in science and technology - the number of patents granted per person, and how many Nobel Prizes the country’s people had won in science, for example.

They found that intelligence made a difference in gross domestic product. For each one-point increase in a country’s average Intelligence Quotient (IQ), the per capita gross domestic product (GDP) was $229 higher.

It made an even bigger difference if the smartest five percent of the population got smarter, for every additional IQ point in that group, a country’s per capita GDP was $468 higher.

“Within a society, the level of the most intelligent people is important for economic productivity,” Rindermann says.