Population Health Research Paper

ABSTRACT

A healthy economy is crucial not only from the social perspective but from the economic perspective as well. There exists a bidirectional relationship between economic growth and health. There has been a consensus on the fact that economic growth of a country can greatly influence the health status. But this paper will address whether health has the ability to bless an economy with wealth. The main motive throughout the paper will be to figure out how health plays its role as a causal factor in explaining the earnings of an individual and growth of an economy as a whole. By reviewing the literature, this paper aims at conducting an in depth analysis of whether poorly developed nations can perform better by allocating funds into public

There exists a positive correlation between improvements in population health and economic growth and development (Weil, 2007), Bloom,Canning, and Sevilla (2004). However, there is an influential paper by (Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, 2007) which failed to support this view. The paper has tried to estimate the impact of life expectancy on the economic performance of a country. An evidence of a negative correlation between improvements in population health and economic growth over the period 1940-2000 has been found. The analysis is based on predicted mortality used as an instrument because of its large impacts on life expectancy of the population after 1940 but not before

Likewise an exogenous decline in the mortality rate would decrease the rate of growth of population as precautionary demand for children decreases and this decline would be larger, the stronger is the relative desire for status. So, overall the GDP per capita increases.

So, looking at all the three papers on mortality we can conclude that with a decline in the mortality rate, the investments increase and fertility rate falls, leading to a rise in economic growth of a country.

But when we say that declines in mortality encourages human capital investment it should be noted that for accumulation/addition to human capital presence, highly skilled labor force is a must to stimulate technical discoveries but since data for this may not be available we have to satisfy ourselves with their health as a broader measure.

Interventions in global health saves lives but this may provoke the functioning of Malthus’s theory of population where rise in population growth rates leads to exploitative use of natural resources limiting the per person availability and thus the net benefit of saving humans start declining. So, along with a decline in mortality, there needs be technological improvements to avoid the Mathusian trap and for the economy to grow.

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