Health and Growth: Causality through Education

Purpose--The paper theoretically and empirically investigates the impact on human capital investment decisions and income growth of lowered life expectancy as a result of HIV/AIDS and other diseases. Design/methodology/approach--The theoretical model is a three-period overlapping generations model where individuals go through three stages in their life, namely, young, adult and old. The model extends existing theoretical models by allowing the probability of premature death to differ for individuals at different life stage, and by allowing for stochastic technological advances. The empirical investigation focuses on the effect of HIV/AIDS on life expectancy and on the role of health on educational investments and growth. We address potential endogeneity by using various strategies, such as controlling for country specific time-invariant unobservables and by using the male circumcision rate as an instrumental variable for HIV/AIDS prevalence. Findings--We show theoretically that an increased probability of premature death leads to less investment in human capital, and consequently slower growth. Empirically we show that HIV/AIDS has resulted in a substantial decline in life expectancy in African countries and these falling life expectancies are indeed associated with lower educational attainment and slower economic growth world wide. Originality/value--The theoretical and empirical findings reveal a causal link flowing from health to growth, which has been largely overlooked by the existing literature. The main implication is that health investments, that decrease the incidence of diseases like HIV/AIDS resulting on increases in life expectancy, through its complementarity with human capital investments lead to long run growth..

NPCA EDUCATION COMMITTEE

The major thrust of the Education Committee results from the rather urgent need to implement interesting programs in which supervisors may train for examination and certification under the qualifications of the pesticide act. While it is not easy at this time to determine what certification is going to be, what supervisors are going to be involved, what kind of examination they are going to have to take, and how the state is going to interpret all of this, we therefore cannot be specific. The wheels are grinding away, and as you know, the timetable is winding down; and we may be faced with a rather short period of time to get these people qualified. Our industry hopes that we will have the training to offer and that all supervisors from around the country have the opportunity to prepare, take the examination, and be certified.