Health and Economic Growth: Findings and Policy Implications

While human capital is a clear determinant of economic growth, only recently hashealth's role in this process become a focus of serious academic inquiry. By marrying the separatefields of health economics and growth theory, this groundbreaking book explores the explicitmechanisms by which a population's individual and collective health status affects a nation'seconomic development and performance. International leaders from both fields have contributedoriginal essays that employ theoretical and empirical perspectives on the relationship betweenhealth and economic growth, including the relevant interconnections with investment in education,family planning, and productivity.Each of the book's five sections deals with a different aspect ofthis dynamic. These include the channels through which health human capital generates both higherincome and individual well-being; the impact of health on long-run development, economic growth, andpoverty reduction; the link between human capital levels and fertility and mortality rates, withmodels that analyze demographic and epidemiological transitions; the quantitative effect of betterhealth on labor productivity and wages; and, finally, the devastating effects of AIDS -- inunderdeveloped countries the most deadly, most economically adverse, and the surest barrier togrowth -- on individual well-being and populations, and the prospects for incentives for developingnew treatments. A concluding chapter integrates the different microeconomic and macrodynamicanalyses and draws some policy conclusions for future study.

Luis Currais is Associate Professor of Economics at the University A Coruna in Spain and Research Associate at the Center of Research in Economics and Health at Pompeu Fabra University.