هزینه های اجتماعی، سرمایه انسانی و رشد در کشورهای در حال توسعه

Using panel data from 118 developing countries in 1971–2000, this paper explores the channels linking social spending, human capital, and growth and compares the effects of alternative economic policy interventions. With separate modeling for education and health capital, explicit control for governance, and incorporation of nonlinearity, the paper finds that both education and health spending have a positive and significant impact on education and health capital, and thus support higher growth. Also, other policy interventions, such as improving governance and taming inflation, can achieve similar results. Hence, higher spending alone is likely insufficient to achieve the Millennium Development Goals.

The role of human capital in fostering economic development is well recognized in the growth literature. Following Romer, 1986 and Lucas, 1988, human capital has been identified not only as a key contributor to growth and poverty alleviation, but also as an ultimate development objective to expand human freedom more generally (Ravallion and Chen, 1997, Schultz, 1999, Sen, 1999 and Squire, 1993). The growing global focus on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)1 has further highlighted the importance of making tangible progress in key education and health indicators. A crucial issue in this regard is the role of public policy in helping countries foster human capital and meet the MDGs. Education and health are two essential dimensions of human capital and core elements of the MDGs. In most countries, the public sector plays a dominant role in providing the educational and health services necessary to build human capital. As such, the impact of this spending on social indicators, and the impact of higher spending versus other policy interventions (such as improvements in fiscal sustainability or improvements in governance) that might also help countries meet the MDGs (via their salutary effects on economic growth) are of great interest. While positive externalities or market failures may justify the involvement of the public sector in these areas, this does not, in itself, indicate that higher spending per se is the most effective or the only policy intervention for helping meet the MDGs.2 This paper seeks to contribute to this debate by providing an integrated assessment of the role of social spending and other policy interventions on human capital, economic growth, and social indicators. Building upon earlier studies, we analyze the dynamic direct and indirect effects of social spending on human capital and growth, while taking into account the interaction between education and health interventions. The empirical estimates are based on a panel dataset covering 118 developing countries from 1975 to 2000. The paper also examines the impact of different policy interventions for fostering human capital and growth. The remainder of the paper is structured as follows. In Section 2, a review of the existing literature is provided. In Section 3, an explanation of the data and model is given. Section 4 provides the empirical results, including robustness tests. Section 5 summarizes the simulated effects of different policy interventions on growth and social indicators. Section 6 discusses policy implications and concludes the paper.

The paper finds that a number of policy interventions could be effective in moving countries toward the MDGs. Both education and health spending have a positive and significant direct impact on the accumulation of education and health capital, and a positive and significant indirect impact on growth. An increase in education spending of 1 percentage point of GDP is associated with 3 more years of schooling on average and raises the annual growth of GDP per capita by 1.4 percentage points in 15 years. Similarly, an increase in health spending of 1 percentage point of GDP is associated with an increase of 0.6 percentage point in the under-5 child survival rate and a rise of 0.5 percentage point in annual per capita GDP growth. There is a significant time lag between increases in education spending and the realization of their full effects on social indicators and growth. Two-thirds of the direct impact of education spending is felt within five years, but the full impact materializes with a significant time lag of 10–15 years. Such a lag needs to be kept in mind when designing policy interventions. The impact of health spending, however, is immediate. The positive effects of both education and health spending are strongly influenced by the quality of governance. In countries suffering from poor governance, the positive effects of increased spending on education is reduced, and those of higher health spending can be completely negated. There are substantial differences in the effects of social spending on social indicators and growth among different country groups. The positive effects are the highest in low-income countries and sub-Saharan Africa. This supports the view that social spending can be more effective in such countries in achieving MDGs, as the marginal returns to social spending tend to decline for countries with high levels of social outlays. However, given the wide variation of country circumstances and the nonlinearity in the effects as shown in this paper, the results should be taken with caution when applied to policy analysis at the country level. Additional research is also needed to assess the effects of different components of social spending (e.g., primary education, secondary education spending). Other policy interventions may also achieve improvement of a similar size in social indicators and growth. In particular, strengthening governance can have a strong payoff for social indicators as well as for growth. Therefore, reducing corruption and increasing the accountability for public spending are no less important than increasing spending. In addition, macroeconomic policies, such as reducing inflation and improving fiscal balances, also have a positive effect on growth and, in turn, on the poverty headcount. The results have a number of implications for poverty reduction strategies aimed at meeting the MDGs. Given the importance of different policy interventions, efforts to meet the MDGs will need to be wide-ranging and include strengthening the macroeconomic environment and governance. Relative to the significant cost of raising spending, the moderate effects of social spending on indicators also confirm the important role of reforms aimed at improving the efficiency and targeting of these outlays. Furthermore, while improving human capital will have a salutary effect on growth, it will be far from a panacea for unlocking the more robust expansion in economic activity needed to achieve the MDGs. As such, additional research is needed to address the key policy interventions needed to achieve rapid economic growth.