سهم افزایش امید به زندگی به توسعه اقتصادی در قرن بیستم ژاپن

This paper estimates the value of improved health in Japan over the twentieth century. By valuing the decline in the death rate and appending this to existing measures of GDP per capita it is possible to calculate health augmented GDP per capita growth and generate original results about the monetary value of improved life expectancy over the twentieth century in Japan. The findings of the paper indicate that this is a pertinent exercise because GDP per capita growth approximately doubles when it is extended to include increases in the life expectancy of the population of Japan. These results also provide a justification for the increase in health care service spending that was evident at the close of the twentieth century.

Accompanying Japan's successful industrialisation were similarly impressive improvements in health. During the twentieth century life expectancy increased by 36 years, 28.5 of which occurred between 1947 and 2000 (JMHW, 2001). Increases in life expectancy are an important manifestation of improvements in human welfare. However these developments have been unrecognised by conventional ‘Hicksian’ or production based measures of economic growth, which only consider national output and income. The motivation for this paper is to value Japan's health in conjunction with existing GDP per capita measures in order to provide a more accurate indication of Japan's economic development. This more comprehensive measure of economic growth will be achieved through adjusting real income to reflect the value of improving health status. The intuition is that the same annual income with a long and healthy life should be ranked as a higher living standard than that income with a short and diseased life. Hence, people are better off when they live longer and this fact should be recognised in measures of their income, living standards, and national product. This feature is especially pronounced given Japan's world leadership in average life expectancy.

By applying a willingness to pay methodology to twentieth century Japan it has been possible to more comprehensively calculate economic development, by creating an original measure of health augmented GDP per capita. The results of this exercise seem worthwhile as the value of reduced mortality over the twentieth century has been estimated to be in the region of $4462 to $11,727 million. This adds between 1.3% (lower bound) and 3.5% (mid range) to conventional measures of per annum GDP per capita growth. As such health augmented GDP per capita approximately doubles conventional compound average annual rates of growth between 1900 and 2000. These results emphasise the story about Japan's growth as they indicate that development (which is better proxied by gauging mortality as well as income) has also experienced substantial gains over the twentieth century.