Health, Human Capital, and Development

Hoyt Bleakley

Annual Review of Economics, 2010, vol. 2, issue 1, 283-310

Abstract: How much does disease depress development in human capital and income around the world? I discuss a range of micro evidence, which finds that health is both human capital itself and an input to producing other forms of human capital. I use a standard model to integrate these results and suggest a reinterpretation of much of the micro literature. I then discuss the aggregate implications of micro estimates but note the complications in extrapolating to general equilibrium, especially because of health's effect on population size. I also review the macro evidence on this topic, which consists of either cross-country comparisons or measuring responses to health shocks. Micro estimates are one to two orders of magnitude smaller than the cross-country relationship but nevertheless imply high benefit-to-cost ratios from improving certain forms of health.

Keywords: disease; income; schooling; economic growth; envelope theorem (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I15 J24 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (93)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.economics.102308.124436 (application/pdf)
Full text downloads are only available to subscribers. Visit the abstract page for more information.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:anr:reveco:v:2:y:2010:p:283-310

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.annualreviews.org/action/ecommerce

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Annual Review of Economics from Annual Reviews Annual Reviews 4139 El Camino Way Palo Alto, CA 94306, USA.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by http://www.annualreviews.org ().