Health Human Capital Of Rural Residents: Income Effects And Impact Factors

Health, a necessary and sufficient condition of economic development and the ultimate goal of human developing. There is big disparity between the health statuses of rural residents and urban residents. Nevertheless, the problem of the role of health human capital has not yet been given enough importance. Researches on health improvement have attached much value to medical care, but little to income, education and other social economic factors. There are also alternative opinions on the new rural cooperative medical system which is being extensively enforced currently.This paper, based on human capital theory and Grossman theory, and applying frontier measurement method, answers three core questions:(1) What are the influences of health, as a part of human capital, on labor participation and income of rural residents? (2) In addition to medical care factors, how do social economic factors, like income and education, etc, affect health of rural residents? (3) If the New Cooperative Medical scheme (NCMS) being carried out in rural areas increases the accessibility of medical care service and improves health conditions of rural residents?Content of empirical studies and answers to the three questions are:(1) The empirical study shows that good current and lag health statuses can obviously increase the probabilities of labor participation. Besides, lag health status adds a bigger marginal participation rate of male people to the non-farm work. Good health status improves all kinds of incomes, such as farm income, business income, wage income, and general income. Good current health status improves general income by a rate of 14.4%, compared to a rate of 7% by good lag health status, whereas education human capital has on significant effect on income. The influence of health human capital on incomes of urban residents is lighter than that on incomes of rural residents, due to the effect of education human capital. Therefore, as to rural residents, health human capital plays an important role for both labor participation and income improvement.(2) The health of rural residents is prone to be affected by various social economic factors. Empirical studies state that long term incomes and prices of medical care have significant influences on health of rural residents, taking into consideration of health depreciation by age. Higher education levels above junior high school have a positive effect on health. There are remarkable differences between health statuses of people living in different areas. Generally, these factors have alternative influences on male and female. By controlling for the dynamics of health in the formal model, we find that either good initial health or good lag health helps to increase the probability of good current health. By contract, health of urban residents is mainly affected by age and initial health, rather than income, medical care prices or education. The different situations between urban and rural residents demonstrate that, under the dual economic structure of urban and rural areas, health of rural residents is more fragile than that of urban residents.(3) The carryover effect of NCMS is estimated using triple difference model with a treatment group and two control groups by controlling the random of medical insurance participation. The empirical work argues that NCMS increases the convenience of medical treatment and brings about more people taking medical treatment in provincial and city-level hospitals rather than increases use of rural level medical services. This point implies that medical services of rural level are waited for improvement. Besides, NCMS leads to much higher prices of medical treatment. Yet there is no increase in general medical care expense of the whole population. However, NCMS helps to save the medical care expense of people of low-middle level incomes, which is found by applying the model with specific groups of alternative income level. Moreover, NCMS tends to, decrease sickness, whereas there's no improvement in self assessed health of rural residents. Therefore, measurements in the promotion of NCMS in future should be taken by directing at these above mentioned limitations.In general, the applicability of using human capital theory and Grossman demand theory in studies on health of rural residents is tested theoretically and some references are drawn for policies regard health security of rural residents practically. The paper reacquaints the effects of health of rural residents on labor participation and income, makes up for the imperfection in researches in factors influencing health by incorporating social economic factors such as income and education, and applies Dynamic Panel Probit model and triple difference model for the first time in researches nationally, which expands the feasibility of econometric methods and makes the conclusions more indicative for policies by effectively controlling for unobservable variables.