UNU-MERIT Working Papers Series
A closer look at the relationship between life expectancy and economic growth
Théophile T. Azomahou, R. Boucekkine & Bity Diene #2008-027We 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.
Key words: Life expectancy, economic growth, perpetual youth,
age-dependent mortality, nonparametric estimation
JEL codes: O41, I20, J10
UNU-MERIT Working Papers
ISSN 1871-9872
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