When Training Meets Education: Human-Capital Complementarities and Labour Productivity in Ghanaian Enterprises

Abstract:

Employee training and workforce education are central elements of firm human capital, but their joint productivity value remains uncertain in developing economies. This study examined whether formal employee training was associated with labour productivity in Ghanaian enterprises and whether the educational composition of the permanent workforce strengthened that relationship. The analysis used the Ghana World Bank Enterprise Survey 2023. Real labour productivity was calculated as annual sales, expressed in constant 2019 Ghana cedis, divided by permanent full-time employment. The natural logarithm of productivity was used because the raw distribution was highly skewed. Formal training was measured directly, while workforce education was harmonised from two mutually exclusive survey forms: the percentage of employees completing high school and a count converted to the same percentage scale. Following World Bank procedures, potentially unbounded sales and employment values were screened after log transformation, sampling weights were applied, and realized industry was used. The analytical sample contained 629 establishments. Survey-weighted regression controlled for firm age, employment size, manager sector experience, foreign ownership, industry and region. The weighted training rate was 48.3%, the mean workforce education share was 82.7%, and geometric labour productivity was GH₵45,412 per permanent employee. Formal training had a positive but statistically uncertain association with productivity, b = 0.392, SE = 0.232, p = .091. A 10-percentage-point increase in workforce education was associated with 14.7% higher productivity (b = 0.137, SE = 0.050, p = .006). The training-by-education interaction was near zero, b = -0.009, SE = 0.086, p = .921. Alternative weights, bootstrap analysis, sector controls and outlier tests supported the null interaction. The results show that workforce education is a strong productive resource, while formal training may add value independently but did not become more productive as the workforce education share increased. Firms should align training with specific performance gaps and evaluate learning transfer rather than assuming automatic complementarity with formal education.