This paper describes the effects of workers' investments in their own education in light of the complementarity the Acemoglu (1997) and Redding (1996) showed to exist between R&D and education investments. Despite the different investment efforts that economies pour into their economies, many developing, and least developed countries are trapped in what's called "low-income or middle-income countries". A Model of Distance to Frontier and the Composition of Education Spending (Vandenbussche, Aghion, & Meghir, 2006) describes the effect of investments in education by workers results in effecting entrepreneurs' investments in R&D activities and productivity for greater economic growth. In the low-development traps; the complementarity between R&D and education investments model, each individual life two periods and produces as entrepreneur only when old according to the linear technology. As an individual living his/her life, that individual has some endowments to use but also a few choices to select from between consumption, education, and size of spending on each. An Individual's decisions affect the size of resources he/she will have to live with during the second period. In short, the model is developed to test how these low-development traps play out, in which the way that individual lives are affected by educational spending is modeled. Implementing the frontier technology is key to higher productivity and economic growth. The dissertation shows the importance of human capital investment in education and R&D in determining the likelihood of innovation occurring and the economic growth rate. My strategy is to test the complementarity between science and mathematics education and R&D investments on economic growth using cross-section data from the World Bank, PISA-OECD, and the Conference Board Inc. With a sample of seventy-six countries that differ in term of development, education system, and natural resources I test the impact of innovation activities on the economic growth as a result of the effectiveness of the education system. The reason for selecting the World Bank data is the availability of the data and easy access to them. To effectively understand the impact of innovation activities on economic growth, I classified countries based on their stage of industrialization by following the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO). The data covers the period between 2000 to 2018. Based on the study, I can safely say that the complementarity between scientific or mathematical education and R&D is a strategic move for economies to achieve higher economic growth and advancement. The impact of the interaction term between the investments in both activities is positively significant relative to economic growth. These results confirm that spending on education has a positive and significant impact on economic growth, specifically science and mathematics education. Countries differ in terms of their education spending, and many factors impact their economic growth. A complementarity between R&D and science and mathematics investments is needed to improve innovation activities, as such activities are able to give countries a new competitive advantage. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com.bibliotheek.ehb.be/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]