Mortality, morbidity and economic growth

Lorenzo Rocco; Elena Fumagalli; Andrew Mirelman; Marc Suhrcke

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0251424

Mortality, morbidity and economic growth

Lorenzo Rocco^*
, Elena Fumagalli
, Andrew Mirelman
, Marc Suhrcke

^*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › Academic › peer-review

Abstract

The question of whether and how changes to population health impact on economic growth has been actively studied in the literature, albeit with mixed results. We contribute to this debate by reassessing–and extending–[1], one of the most influential studies. We include a larger set of countries (135) and cover a more recent period (1990–2014). We also account for morbidity in addition to mortality and adopt the strategy of providing bounding sets for the effects of interest rather than point estimates. We find that reducing mortality and disability adjusted life years (DALYs), a measure which combines morbidity and mortality, promotes per capita GDP growth. The magnitude of the effect is moderate, but non negligible, and it is similar for mortality and DALYs.

Original language	English
Article number	e0251424
Number of pages	22
Journal	PLoS One
Volume	16
Issue number	5
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0251424
Publication status	Published - 27 May 2021

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
Copyright: © 2021 Rocco et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

UN SDGs

This output contributes to the following UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

SDG 8 Decent Work and Economic Growth

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AU - Suhrcke, Marc

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Mortality, morbidity and economic growth

Abstract

Bibliographical note

UN SDGs

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