Impact of public education expenditure and health expenditure on economic growth and human development indices in northern India

Abstract

The study has examined the impact of education expenditure and health expenditure on economic growth (GSDP has been used as a proxy for the economic growth) at current prices and constant prices in the Northern India, including Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Punjab, Chandigarh, Haryana, Delhi, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh during the period from 1980-81 to 2016-17. The study has used Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) approach. In order to find the real changes with reference to GSDP, EE, HE and IK, the constant prices have been calculated by using Wholesale Price Index (WPI) with 1980-81 as the base year through the splicing and base shifting method. Furthermore, the study has also investigated the effect of health expenditure (HE) on health status (death rate has been used as a proxy for the health status) from 1980-81 to 2016-17 in the Northern India, including Himachal Pradesh, Punjab, Chandigarh, Haryana, Delhi, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh. The variables have been transformed to natural logarithm form before conducting the test. The study has used EViews 10 software for the analysis. The study has also explored the educational attainment and health attainment indicators, the educational attainment indicators include the literacy rate, the number of educational institutions such as primary and junior basic schools, middle schools and secondary schools; the number of teachers at educational institutions and the number of students at educational institutions. There are two categories of health indicators (a) health input (b) health output. The health input indicators comprising of expenditure incurred on the health facilities such as medical institutions, doctors, nurses and beds. Health output included in the study are birth rates, death rates, neo-natal mortality rates, post-natal mortality rates, peri-natal mortality rates, infant mortality rates, death rates of children (aged 0-4 years), general fertility rates and total fertility rates. newline