A closer look at the relationship between life expectancy and economic growth
Azomahou, Théophile T., Boucekkine, Raouf and Diene, Bity (2008). A closer look at the relationship between life expectancy and economic growth. UNU-MERIT.
Document type:
Report
Collection:
-
Attached Files (Some files may be inaccessible until you login with your UNU Collections credentials) Name Description MIMEType Size Downloads wp2008-027.pdf PDF 
application/pdf 1.31MB -
Sub-type Working paper Author Azomahou, Théophile T.
Boucekkine, Raouf
Diene, BityTitle A closer look at the relationship between life expectancy and economic growth Publication Date 2008 Place of Publication Maastricht, NL Publisher UNU-MERIT Pages 50 Abstract We first provide a nonparametric inference of the relationship between life expectancy and economic growth on an historical data for 18 countries over the period 1820-2005. The obtained shape shows up convexity for low enough values of life expectancy and concavity for large enough values. We then study this relationship on a benchmark model combining “perpetual youth" and learning-by-investing. In such a benchmark, the generated relationship between life expectancy and economic growth is shown to be strictly increasing and concave. We finally examine two models departing from “perpetual youth" by assuming successively age-dependent earnings and age-dependent survival probabilities. With age-dependent earnings, the obtained relationship is hump-shaped while agedependent survival laws do reproduce the convex-concave shape detected in the prior empirical study. Keyword Life expectancy
Economic growth
Perpetual youth
Age-dependent mortality
Nonparametric estimationJEL O41
I20
J10Copyright Holder UNU-MERIT Copyright Year 2008 Copyright type All rights reserved ISSN 18719872 -
Citation counts 
Search Google Scholar
Access Statistics: 1105 Abstract Views, 526 File Downloads - Detailed Statistics Created: Wed, 11 Dec 2013, 16:22:50 JST