Health Human Capital And Economic Growth

The fact that human capital has significant effect on economic growth has formed consensus among numerous scholars, however, the health human capital is of no uniform measure,scholars offen overlook the effect that health human capital factors has on economic growth. Most scholars merely study the impact of human capital on economic growth from the perspective of education human capital.Since the reform and opening up, China’s economy has been in a rapid upward trend for years,.the health human capital also increased among this time.More and more people pay attention to health, the health human capital has been included into economic growth research framework gradually, we can see that research on the effect health human capital has on economic growth has important theoretical and practical significance.This paper firstly study the health human capital and economic growth theory, and then analyze how the health human capital affect economic growth. Secondly, this paper takes eight indicators such as life expectancy, birth rate, mortality rate, personal health care spending in rural areas, urban personal health care spending, health workers per thousand population, the number of hospital beds per thousand population, per capita health expenditures, based on factor analysis, to build a healthy human capital index, and ranked the country’s 29 provinces by above-mentioned healthy human capital index.Thirdly, this paper introduces health human capital to the Solow model,constructing an economic growth model that contains healthy human capital, education, human capital and physical capital.we use panel data in 29 provinces and autonomous regions from 2000 to 2012 to study the effect that health human capital has on economic growth, respectively applying GMM method and fixed effects modle.The results show that, the health human capital has significant on China’s economy growth. Also, the health human capital can promote education human capital. The empirical results show that the health human capital output elasticity is higher in eastern China than that of central China and the western China, Finally, on the basis of the conclusions of the empirical analysis, we propose several policy recommendations to improve the health human capital.