Working Paper #2008-027
A closer look at the relationship between life expectancy and economic growth
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.
- Keywords
-
- Life expectancy
- economic growth
- perpetual youth
- age-dependent mortality
- nonparametric estimation
- JEL codes
-
- O41
- I20
- J10
- UNU-MERIT
- Working
- Papers
- ISSN
- 1871-9872
Cite this as
APA 7th ed.Azomahou, T. T., Boucekkine, R., & Diene, B. (2008). A closer look at the relationship between life expectancy and economic growth (UNU-MERIT Working Paper No. 2008-027). UNU-MERIT. https://unu-merit.nl/publications/working-papers/abstract/?id=3367