Investigating the Relationship between Health and Economic Growth: Empirical Evidence from a Panel of 5 Asian Countries

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the relationship between health and economic growth through including investment, exports, imports, and research and development (R&D), for 5 Asian countries using panel unit root, panel cointegration with structural breaks and panel long-run estimator for the period 1974-2007. We model this relationship within the production function framework, and unravel two important results. First, we find that in all four variants of the growth model, variables share a long-run relationship; that is, they are cointegrated. Second, we find that in the long-run, while health, investment, exports, EDRD (the interaction term between education and R&D), and R&D have contributed positively to economic growth, imports have had a statistically significant negative effect while education has had an insignificant effect. We draw important policy implications from these findings.