We develop a simple open-economy growth model in which productivity growth and education influence each other, and use it to empirically address issues of causality between them. Technology adoption fostered by human capital and economic openness determines productivity growth; the framework allows us to evaluate whether the effects of these two variables on growth documented in previous cross-country regression studies carry over to a simultaneous system closely allied to a model. This model implies that an increase in openness will stimulate technical change but, for empirically plausible values of the intertemporal elasticity of substitution, it will cause a decrease in the level of education. The empirical analysis specifies productivity growth and human capital as endogenous variables and finds evidence broadly consistent with the theory—openness and education stimulate productivity growth, and there is a negative effect of this growth on human capital accumulation.