Abstract:

Health is expressed as an affecting factor of economic growth, which is one of the human capital factors. The improvement in health level with the increase in population, education, labor productivity, lifetime and quality of life may have a decisive effect on economic stability and growth by preventing future diseases. Although there is mostly a two-way relationship between health and economic growth in the findings of researches, some studies find no relationship. Different findings may be due to the neglect of health policy differences between countries in studies. Unlike previous studies in the literature, this study explores the impact of health on economic growth in all provinces of a country where the same health policy is applied with the panel data analysis method. For this purpose, covering the 2007-2017 period, the model including the vari-bles that the gross domestic product, public investment, exports, imports, the infant mortality rate, the number of hospital beds, the number of people graduated from high school and the number of people has a bachelor's degree for all provinces in Turkey was estimated by the system GMM analysis. According to the findings, Turkey’s health variables; 1% reduction in infant mortality rate causes an increase of 0.03% on GDP, 1% increase in the number of hospital beds causes an increase of 0.16% on GDP. The education vary-bles, however, contributes to economic growth more than health variables, it is an undeniable fact that health is a prerequisite for education and economic growth. In this context, policy makers should pursue pol-icies to improve individual and community health.

Keywords:

Abstract:

Health is expressed as an affecting factor of economic growth, which is one of the human capital factors. The improvement in health level with the increase in population, education, labor productivity, lifetime and life quality, may have a decisive effect on economic stability and growth by preventing future diseases. Although there is mostly a two-way relationship between health and economic growth in the findings of researches, some studies find no relationship. Different findings may be due to the neglect of health policy differences between countries in studies. Unlike previous studies in the literature, this study explores the impact of health on economic growth in all provinces of a country where the same health policy is applied with the panel data analysis method. For this purpose, covering the 2007-2017 period, the model including the varia-bles that the gross domestic product, public investment, exports, imports, the infant mortality rate, the number of hospital beds, the number of people graduated from high school and the number of people has a bachelor's degree for all provinces in Turkey was estimated by the system GMM analysis. According to the findings, Turkey’s health variables; 1 % reduction in infant mortality rate causes an increase of 0.03 % on GDP, 1 % increase in the number of hospital beds causes an increase of 0,16 % on GDP. The education varia-bles, however, contribute to economic growth more than health variables, it is an undeniable fact that health is a prerequisite for education and economic growth. In this context, policy makers should pursue pol-icies to improve individual and community health.