Accounting for the effect of health on economic growth

被引:316
作者
Weil, David N. [1 ]
机构
[1] Brown Univ, Providence, RI 02912 USA
[2] NBER, Cambridge, MA 02138 USA
关键词
D O I
10.1162/qjec.122.3.1265
中图分类号
F [经济];
学科分类号
02 ;
摘要
I use microeconomic estimates of the effect of health on individual outcomes to construct macroeconomic estimates of the proximate effect of health on GDP per capita. I employ a variety of methods to construct estimates of the return to health, which I combine with cross-country and historical data on height, adult survival rates, and age at menarche. Using my preferred estimate, eliminating health differences among countries would reduce the variance of log GDP per worker by 9.9 percent and reduce the ratio of GDP per worker at the 90th percentile to GDP per worker at the 10th percentile from 20.5 to 17.9. While this effect is economically significant, it is also substantially smaller than estimates of the effect of health on economic growth that are derived from cross-country regressions.
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页码:1265 / 1306
页数:42
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