TY  - JOUR
AU  - Bloom,David E.
AU  - Canning,David
AU  - Sevilla,Jaypee
TI  - The Effect of Health on Economic Growth: Theory and Evidence
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 8587
PY  - 2001
Y2  - November 2001
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w8587
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w8587.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
David E. Bloom
Harvard School of Public Health
Department of Global Health and Population
665 Huntington Ave.
Boston, MA 02115
Tel: 617/432-0866
Fax: 617/432-6733
E-Mail: dbloom@hsph.harvard.edu

David Canning
Harvard School of Public Health
Department of Global Health and Population
665 Huntington Ave.
Boston, MA 02115
Tel: 617/432-6336
Fax: 617/566-0365
E-Mail: dcanning@hsph.harvard.edu

Jaypee Sevilla
Department of Population & Int'l Health
Harvard School of Public Health
Building I, Room 1210d
665 Huntington Avenue
Boston, MA 02115
Tel: 617/432-4054
E-Mail: jsevilla@hsph.harvard.edu
AB  - Macroeconomists acknowledge the contribution of human capital to economic growth, but their empirical studies define human capital solely in terms of schooling. In this paper, we extend production function models of economic growth to account for two additional variables that microeconomists have identified as fundamental components of human capital: work experience and health. Our main result is that good health has a positive, sizable, and statistically significant effect on aggregate output. We find little variation across countries in average work experience, thus differentials in work experience account for little variation in rates of economic growth. Finally, we find that the effects of average schooling on national output are consistent with microeconomic estimates of the effects of individual schooling on earnings, suggesting that education creates no discernible externalities.
ER  -