IMPACT OF HEALTH ON WORKER PRODUCTIVITY: EVIDENCE FROM SOUTH ASIA

Abstract

Health is considered an essential element that enables people to spend their life with great potential. A healthy life helps to live with confidence and self-esteem. At the macro level, the key foundation of economic development is health. On the micro-level, health can efficiently ensure people how to attain productive and gratifying life. Health affects economic growth in many ways i.e. workers' poor health causes a reduction in productivity, on the other hand, due to healthy nutrition productivity rises. The core objective of conducting this study is to investigate the impact of human health on worker productivity. The health proxies that are used in this study is life expectancy. The indicator of education is the school enrollment at the secondary level; labor force and gross capital formation are also used as independent variables. The study used a panel of South Asian countries from 1991 to 2019, by applying panel OLS, fixed-effects model, random-effects model, and generalized method of moments (GMM). The results demonstrate that health and education significantly and positively influence productivity. This study recommends that the government of every South Asian country should take essential steps and make policies regarding improvement in health status and advancement in the education system.