Healthy Human Capital And Economic Growth

Background: Based on the economic growth theory that human capital is one of the major reasons that cause deference of labor productivity between different region and countries. Healthy human capital and educational human capital are the most two important types of human capital, and human capital is based on healthy human capital.The healthy human capital will be increased directly by the governmental invest on sanitation, individual invest on nutrition. And also healthy human capital can be increased indirectly by the payout of medical treatment with which can eliminate disease. The Expenditure for Public Health, food and medical treatment are the major parts that healthy human capital is composed of. So we can say that all of the expenditure for the forming of healthy human capital is also a kind of investment.The main purpose of this study is to calculate the coefficient of elasticity of the healthy human capital investment to the economic growth, which can make a reasonable evaluation of the role of health service in social life and its importance for economic growth.Objects: 1. To interpret the role of healthy human capital investment in economic growth by theoretical, qualitative and quantitative analysis. 2. To make a comparison of the efficiency of different types of healthy human capital investment as the expenditure for public Health, food and medical treatment.Methods: This article uses the theories research combined with substantial evidences research. 1. There are still some literatures proved the positive relationship between healthy human capital and GDP. And we analyze the correlation coefficient between them. 2. We use ridge regression to investigate the coefficient of elasticity between healthy human capital and GDP.Results: 1. The coefficient of elasticity between healthy human capital and GDP is 0.225. For Expenditure for Public Health, food and medical treatment are 0.041,0.392,0.093. 2. There is a progress on residential nutrition of Sichuan Province. 3. Since 1994, residential expenditure for medical treatment increase rapidly.Conclusion: Healthy human capital is important to economic growth. The result indicates that 1% increase in the healthy human capital accounts for 0.225% increase in GDP. The investment of public health is of much more efficiency than personal health investment. So it's strongly recommended that government should invest more money in public health.