Departamento de Fundamentos del Análisis Económico, Facultad de Economía y Empresa, Universidad de Murcia, Campus de Espinardo 30100 Espinardo, Murcia, Spain.
Econ Hum Biol. 2011 Jan;9(1):30-44. doi: 10.1016/j.ehb.2010.07.001. Epub 2010 Jul 27.
We investigate the relationship between height and some economic-development indicators in modern Spain by means of a recently constructed times series of data on conscripts. We estimate a Vector Autoregressive Equilibrium Correction Model (VECqM) to quantify the height and GDP per capita response to various living-standard indicators. We observe that conditions that perpetuate an elevated level of sickness and mortality and that raise the relative price of consumption goods tend to impede human growth, as reflected in a decline in average adult height, whereas factors that promote the purchase of health services and that help to open up the economy to international trade and ideas have tended to have an opposite effect from the 1850s onward. Our results also indicate that neither the level of per capita GDP nor its growth rate has a unidirectional relation to various measures of living standards, chiefly adult stature. Instead, our findings suggest that there may be behavioral factors (e.g., emphasis on health services), political factors (e.g., degree of openness), and economic factors (e.g., relative consumer costs to GDP deflator) whose affects may have been influenced the level of GDP, over the sample period.
我们通过最近构建的关于应征者的时间序列数据来研究现代西班牙的身高与一些经济发展指标之间的关系。我们估计了向量自回归均衡修正模型（VECqM），以量化身高和人均 GDP 对各种生活水平指标的反应。我们观察到，持续存在的高发病率和死亡率水平以及提高消费商品相对价格的因素往往会阻碍人类的成长，这反映在平均成人身高的下降上，而促进购买健康服务和帮助经济向国际贸易和思想开放的因素往往自 19 世纪 50 年代以来就产生了相反的影响。我们的研究结果还表明，人均 GDP 水平及其增长率与各种生活水平指标（主要是成人身高）之间没有单向关系。相反，我们的研究结果表明，可能存在行为因素（例如，对健康服务的重视）、政治因素（例如，开放程度）和经济因素（例如，相对于 GDP 平减指数的消费者成本），这些因素的影响可能在样本期内影响了 GDP 水平。
