The paper we cited is a comprehensive recent meta-analysis on the topic of health and growth that synthesizes the literature on this topic.
The paper concludes:
“If improving health leads to growth, this would be a reason, beyond the welfare gain from better health itself, that governments might want to make such investments. However, the evidence for such an effect of health on growth is relatively weak. Cross-country empirical analyses that find large effects for this causal channel tend to have serious identification problems. The few studies that use better identification find small or even negative effects. Theoretical and empirical analyses of the individual causal channels by which health should raise growth find positive effects, but again these tend to be fairly small. Putting the different channels together into a simulation model shows that potential growth effects of better health are only modest, and arrive with a significant delay.”
We did however acknowledge that this claim is controversial:
Moreover, and more controversially, we do not believe that health interventions (whether directly funded or implemented by the state) are the best way to increase growth in the poorest countries.[15] Here, we want to start a discussion on what the most effective causes of growth are, given its huge importance.
This is a topic of ongoing debate in the literature—future research could look into this topic more and a starting point could be the citation trail from the study above.
Having looked at the paper now, I definitely have a different take as to how definitive it is. My maximally contrarian take would be that it’s a non-systematic review in which many (most?) of the works reviewed are in favor of an important causal link running from health to income. I do agree that the overall macro-scale evidence is weak (which is distinct from strong evidence of a weak effect), but this is exactly why people like RCTs over national development! Causal inference at a macro scale is hard!
The paper we cited is a comprehensive recent meta-analysis on the topic of health and growth that synthesizes the literature on this topic.
The paper concludes:
We did however acknowledge that this claim is controversial:
This is a topic of ongoing debate in the literature—future research could look into this topic more and a starting point could be the citation trail from the study above.
Having looked at the paper now, I definitely have a different take as to how definitive it is. My maximally contrarian take would be that it’s a non-systematic review in which many (most?) of the works reviewed are in favor of an important causal link running from health to income. I do agree that the overall macro-scale evidence is weak (which is distinct from strong evidence of a weak effect), but this is exactly why people like RCTs over national development! Causal inference at a macro scale is hard!
(Health and Economic Growth: Reconciling the Micro and Macro Evidence also looks like a good source that I’ll look at.)