Health and education capacity and subsequent economic growth: A multi-horizon panel analysis

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Abstract
Research background: Hospital bed density and national secondary pupil–teacher ratios capture only limited aspects of service capacity, and their associations with subsequent GDP per capita growth may vary with population health and educational attainment. Purpose of the article: This study examines the conditional associations of hospital bed density and secondary pupil-teacher ratios with subsequent annualised GDP per capita growth over three-, five-, and ten-year horizons, and assesses whether these associations vary with initial life expectancy and adult schooling, respectively. Methods: The analysis combines public international data in horizon-specific panels of 112, 111, and 101 economies, containing 1,461, 1,322, and 920 economy–origin-year observations. Four specifications use the same observations within each horizon, country and origin-year fixed effects, initial controls, and separately estimated interactions. Conditional contrasts are reported with country-clustered confidence intervals for observed moderator support, and choices for covariance, source, timing, sample, and specification are examined. Findings & value added: The main results provide no clear statistical evidence of a relationship between hospital bed density or secondary pupil–teacher ratios and subsequent GDP per capita growth. They also do not establish whether these relationships depend on life expectancy at birth or on adult schooling. Some alternative analyses yield statistically significant results, but the findings are not consistent across specifications. The study extends research on health, education, and economic growth by distinguishing service capacity from the population’s health and educational attainment. By examining these relationships over three-, five-, and ten-year periods, it assesses whether the growth associations of service capacity vary with population characteristics and the time horizon considered. This provides evidence on an important distinction: the economic role of health and education cannot be assessed solely through counts of beds and teachers.

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