TY - RPRT AU - Bloom, David E. AU - Canning, David AU - Kotschy, Rainer AU - Prettner, Klaus AU - Schünemann, Johannes TI - Health and Economic Growth: Reconciling the Micro and Macro Evidence PY - 2018/Nov/ PB - Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) CY - Bonn T2 - IZA Discussion Paper IS - 11940 UR - https://www.iza.org/index.php/publications/dp11940 AB - Micro-based and macro-based approaches have been used to assess the effects of health on economic growth. Micro-based approaches aggregate the return on individual health from Mincerian wage regressions to derive the macroeconomic effects of population health. Macro-based approaches estimate a generalized aggregate production function that decomposes output into its components. The microbased approach tends to find smaller effects than the macro-based approach, thus presenting a micromacro puzzle regarding the economic return on health. We reconcile these two strands of literature by showing that the point estimate of the macroeconomic effect of health is quantitatively close to that found by aggregating the microeconomic effects, controlling for potential spillovers of population health at the aggregate level. Our results justify using the micro-based approach to estimate the direct economic benefits of health interventions. KW - economic development KW - human capital KW - population health KW - productivity KW - return on health ER -