Social Spending, Human Capital, and Growth in Developing Countries: Implications for Achieving the Mdgs

By E. Baldacci, Benedict Clements, S. Gupta, Qiang Cui. Social Science Research Network, 2004

272 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Using panel data from 120 developing countries from 1975 to 2000, this paper explores the direct and indirect channels linking social spending, human capital, and growth in a system of equations. The paper finds that both education and health spending have a positive and significant direct impact on the accumulation of education and health capital, and thus can lead to higher economic growth. The paper also finds that other policy interventions, such as improving governance, reducing excessive budget deficits, and taming inflation, can also be helpful in moving countries toward the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). As such, higher spending alone is not sufficient to achieve the MDGs.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, General Health Professions

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d839a3e23941ec60d43c6858caac64d468468ebf

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In Economics and Econometrics

Citations in the corpus

Public infrastructure and growth : new channels and policy implications (2006, unknown): “Several studies have found indeed that where mothers are better educated (and presumably more aware of health risks to their children), infant mortality rates are lower, and attendance rates in school are higher (see Glewwe (1999, 2002) and the cross-country regressions of Baldacci et al. (2004) and”
Does Aid for Education Educate Children? Evidence from Panel Data (2006, background): “Baldacci et al. (2004) come up with the even stronger finding that spending is the only determinant of combined primary and secondary enrolment which remains significant across a number of different econometric specifications.”