TY  - JOUR
AU  - Aghion,Philippe
AU  - Howitt,Peter
AU  - Murtin,Fabrice
TI  - The Relationship Between Health and Growth: When Lucas Meets Nelson-Phelps
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 15813
PY  - 2010
Y2  - March 2010
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w15813
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w15813.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Philippe Aghion
Department of Economics
Harvard University
1805 Cambridge St
Cambridge, MA 02138
Tel: 617/495-6675
Fax: 617/495-4341
E-Mail: paghion@fas.harvard.edu

Peter Howitt
Department of Economics
Brown University, Box B
Providence, RI  02912
E-Mail: peter_howitt@brown.edu

Fabrice Murtin
Organisation for Economic
  Co-operation and Development
2 rue Andre Pascal
75016 Paris, France
E-Mail: fabrice.murtin@oecd.org
AB  - This paper revisits the relationship between health and growth in light of modern endogenous growth theory. We propose a unified framework that encompasses the growth effects of both the rate of improvement of health and the level of health. Based on cross-country regressions over the period 1960-2000, where we instrument for both variables, we find that a higher initial level and a higher rate of improvement in life expectancy both have a significantly positive impact on per capita GDP growth. Then, restricting attention to OECD countries, we find supportive evidence that only the reduction in mortality below age forty generates productivity gains, which in turn may explain why the positive correlation between health and growth in cross-OECD country regressions appears to have weakened since 1960.
ER  -