Topicality. Subjective educational, professional, moral and psychological properties of a person which were important at all times, nowadays receive special significance in the context of the formation of a global knowledge economy,. It now becomes an axiom that a person, his knowledge and skills, his ability to creativity is the main productive resource and the main value of society. Valuable measure gets an economic importance in the sense that, in the case of its deformation, all society's efforts, expenditures of government and intergovernmental institutions, households and other actors in sufficient (or high) cost of human capital achievement will fail in forming the main value and the main productive resource of society.
Aim and tasks. The purpose of the article is to study the functional role, international features of the formation of human capital and their manifestations in the national economy.
Research results. The most developed countries are those which have a high level of human capital development. The functional role of human capital in world development is realized through qualitative improvement of the human potential of the country, the formation of the abilities and needs of its population, plus the characteristics of the contribution of these non-market investments to economic growth, efficiency and competitiveness. Human capital, like all kinds of capital, is not objectively predetermined, it is the result of the joint efforts of the man himself, his family, enterprise, and state. For a person, these efforts are associated with labor costs, time and financial resources, for enterprises and the state - mainly with the financial costs associated with economic and social development. The financial cost of a qualitative improvement of the workforce, which means its transformation into human capital, takes the form of investment � all kinds of investments into a person, that can be valued in cash or another form and are purposeful, that contribute to the growth of labor productivity and increase income level. Investments in human capital in comparison with investments in other types of capital are distinguished by a number of peculiarities that influence the decision making of the subject in relation to the choice between current consumption or savings for the purpose of further investment and accumulation of human capital. Each of the subjects, investing in individual human capital, pursues its own goals and sees in his own way the future benefits of its accumulation.
The dynamics, structure and volume of these investments shows that they differ significantly in the industrialized countries and in Ukraine. The volumes of investments into different components of human capital in Ukraine are lower than in Western countries, the USA, and Japan. As a result, in the last decades there has been a deformed structure of investment in a person, which complicates its quantitative and qualitative reproduction.
Conclusion. International tendencies of human capital development are manifested in the following: the formation of a human-centric concept and the humanization of world development; growth of the role of financial markets in investing in human capital; a large proportion of human capital in the national wealth of highly developed countries; high and stable expenditures on human capital development at all levels of the economy; rapid response of the educational sphere to structural changes in the economy; the transformation of knowledge into the most extensive sphere of investment. In the system of reproduction of human capital in modern Ukraine has accumulated a number of acute problems of socio-economic and moral-ideological nature, which, due to the unfavourable development of events, could lead not only to the progress of the economic system, but also to its destruction.
Human Capital Development in the Context of the Fourth Industrial Revolution
