The Role Of Health Human Capital On Labour Income

With the rapid development of China’s economic, the income gap between urbanand rural areas presents an expanding trend and the expanding income gap willimpede the development of China’s economy and society. The difference inurban-rural human capital is one of the important reasons which make the income gap.Presently, under the situation of most domestic academic researches focusing on theeffect of education, the paper analyzes the role of health (another basilica form ofhuman capital) on urban-rural income.Based on Mincer’s income model, the paper uses the China Health and NutritionSurvey (CHNS) and chooses nutrition and smoking as health indexes to estimate a setof household income functions. The result shows that individual health has asignificant positive effect on income; the health’s economic return of male is higherthan female; the health’s economic return of rural is higher than urban. The healtheffect is different in urban-rural and male-female, and the difference between urbanand rural is bigger than the disparity of male-female, which show a means oflessening the income gap between urban and rural areas, that is, improve farmers’income through increase investment in the rural health human capital. Then, thispaper analyze China’s human capital investment actual status, we find that the humancapital investment have a great increase, but not enough. Therefore, this paper tries togive some suggestions to improve the status quo.