LAUSR

PurposeThe purpose of the paper is to model the modern global practice of social management of human capital – at the state and corporate levels – to determine the perspectives of its optimization and to develop the basic principles of a new methodological approach to social management of human capital, which is preferable in the conditions of social market economy.Design/methodology/approachThe author uses mathematical tools, including correlation and regression analysis. These are applied to determine the influence of each of the 12 indicators for the labor market that are presented as part of The World Economic Forum's (WEF’s) ”The Global Competitiveness Report 2019” on The United Nations Development Programme's (UNDP) Human Development Index. The research objects are countries from each of the four categories of nations, as distinguished by UNDP, in the Human Development Index. By unifying the 2019 data from UNDP and WEF, a data set is formed.FindingsIt is substantiated that in modern economic practice, it is impossible to achieve the “ideal” conditions necessary for applying existing methodological approaches to the social management of human capital, which reduces how effectively current approaches function. Foundation on the existing methods leads to uncertainty as to management of human capital, which is social by 95.14% in 2019. Though the achieved value of the social management of human capital is close to being optimal, it is still not enough to achieve a high level of human development, which was 0.685 on average for the global economy in 2019 and is likely to increase by 31.43% until 2025, for acknowledging the social market status of the modern economy.Originality/valueIt is proven that there is a need for a new, mixed, methodological approach to the social management of human capital, which would optimally combine the best practices of both state and corporate management. The principles for the practical implementation of such an approach are offered, and proposals are developed to substantiate the contribution of this approach to the achievement of the global goals of sustainable development.