GDP and life expectancy in Italy and Spain over the long-run (1861-2008): insights from a time-series approach

Emanuele Felice and Josep Pujol Andreu
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Josep Pujol Andreu: Departament d'Economia i d'Història Econòmica, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

No 2013_06, UHE Working papers from Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Departament d'Economia i Història Econòmica, Unitat d'Història Econòmica

Abstract: The article presents and discusses long-run series of per capita GDP and life expectancy for Italy and Spain (1861-2008). After refining the available estimates in order to make them comparable and with the avail of the most up-to-date researches, the main changes in the international economy and in technological and sociobiological regimes are used as analytical frameworks to re-assess the performances of the two countries; then structural breaks are searched for and Granger causality between the two variables is investigated. The long-run convergence notwithstanding, significant cyclical differences between the two countries can be detected: Spain began to modernize later in GDP, with higher volatility in life expectancy until recent decades; by contrast, Italy showed a more stable pattern of life expectancy, following early breaks in per capita GDP, but also a negative GDP break in the last decades. Our series confirm that, whereas at the early stages of development differences in GDP tend to mirror those in life expectancy, this is no longer true at later stages of development, when, if any, there seems to be a negative correlation between GDP and life expectancy: this finding is in line with the thesis of a non-monotonic relation between life expectancy and GDP and is supported by tests of Granger causality.

Keywords: Italy; Spain; GDP; life expectancy; unified growth theory; demographic transition (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: N13 N14 N33 N34 O47 O52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 36 pages
Date: 2013-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age and nep-his
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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