University School of Management and Entrepreneurship, Delhi Technological University, Delhi, India.
PLoS One. 2018 Oct 17;13(10):e0204940. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0204940. eCollection 2018.
This paper re-examines health-growth relationship using an unbalanced panel of 17 advanced economies for the period 1870-2013 and employs panel generalised method of moments estimator that takes care of endogeneity issues, which arise due to reverse causality. We utilise macroeconomic data corresponding to inflation, government expenditure, trade and schooling in sample countries that takes care of omitted variable bias in growth regression. With alternate model specifications, we show that population health proxied by life expectancy exert a positive and significant effect on both real income per capita as well as growth. Our results are in conformity with the existing empirical evidence on the relationship between health and economic growth, they, however, are more robust due to the presence of long-term data, appropriate econometric procedure and alternate model specifications. We also show a strong role of endogeneity in driving standard results in growth empirics. In addition to life expectancy, other constituent of human capital, education proxied by schooling is also positively associated with real per capita income. Policy implication that follows from this paper is that per capita income can be boosted through focussed policy attention on population health. The results, however, posit differing policy implications for advanced and developing economies.
本文利用 1870-2013 年期间 17 个发达经济体的非均衡面板重新考察了健康与增长的关系，并采用面板广义矩估计方法来解决因反向因果关系而产生的内生性问题。我们使用了样本国家中与通货膨胀、政府支出、贸易和教育相对应的宏观经济数据，以消除增长回归中的遗漏变量偏差。通过不同的模型设定，我们发现，以预期寿命衡量的人口健康对人均实际收入和增长都有积极且显著的影响。我们的结果与健康与经济增长之间关系的现有实证证据相符，但由于存在长期数据、适当的计量经济学程序和替代模型设定，结果更加稳健。我们还表明，内生性在推动增长实证中的标准结果方面起着重要作用。除了预期寿命外，人力资本的另一个组成部分——以受教育年限衡量的教育，也与实际人均收入呈正相关。本文的政策含义是，通过集中关注人口健康，可以提高人均收入。然而，结果对发达经济体和发展中经济体提出了不同的政策含义。
