健康与经济增长的跨国研究

已有文献在考虑健康对经济增长影响时常常只考虑健康因素本身,而忽略其他相关因素从而产生"遗漏变量"问题而影响结论的可信性;或者只考虑健康因素的单一维度,而忽略初始健康水平以及健康水平改善速度都有可能同时影响经济增长。本文基于此,借鉴Nelson-Phelps,Lucas与Barro的方法,构建统一框架并利用跨国数据综合考察健康对经济增长的影响。结论发现,即使在控制其他影响因素后,预期寿命初始水平以及增长速度都对经济增长有显著的正向影响;已有文献中忽略其他条件或者只考虑健康状况的一个维度,都很有可能低估健康对经济增长的实际影响;此外,经济增长"俱乐部"现象与低收入国家初始人力资本水平(包括健康状况与受教育水平)密切相关;不仅如此,工具变量法与OLS估计结果非常一致,表明上述结论非常稳健。

International Research on Health and Economic Growth

Existing literature related to effects of health on economic growth often consider health variable itself only,and this problem of missing variables by omitting other related factors could well cause doubts about their conclusions,or often only considers one aspect of health,either initial health level or health improvement rate,while these different dimensions of health both could well have effects on economic growth.Basied on these problems of missing variables,and in light of contributions by Nelson-Phelps,Lucas and Barro,this article extends a unified framework and uses international data to comprehensively estimate health effects on economic growth.It finds that a higher initial level and a higher rate of improvement in health both have significantly positive effects on economic growth,and omitting other initial factors or only considering level or improvement rate of health will underestimate health effects on growth.The convergence clubs could be well diminished when initial human capital is controlled(including both health and education levels).These above conclusions are consistent both with OLS and IV methods.