The Dual Effect of Health Investment and Healthy Economic Growth

Gu Xuelan; Liu Chengjie

doi:doi:10.16538/j.cnki.jsufe.2017.03.003

Abstract

This paper puts forward a new economic category of healthy economic growth, which refers to a mode of economic growth with a main goal of the development of human health and a main driving force of health investment. And it argues that health investment is the investment for healthy labor or human capital, which is the basic driving force of healthy economic growth. In the short term, because the health investment does not form economic growth effect immediately and also squeezes the material capital investment, there is a reverse change relationship between health investment and healthy economic growth. But in the long term, health investment has a positive change relationship with healthy economic growth because health investment has promoted the sustainable development of healthy labor force and has doubled labor efficiency. On this basis, it uses Chinese data to develop an empirical analysis for the theoretical results above, and proposes some policy suggestions about the improvement of the level of China’s health investment and the transformation of economic growth mode into healthy economic growth mode.