Health Insurance,Health Human Capital And Labor Market Performance

Under the background of demographic transition and the disappearance of demographic dividend is disappearing gradually,how to ease the downward pressure of the economy,achieve high-speed economic development,have become one of the issues the government concerned.Numerous studies show that China can increase economic growth through improving the quality of human capital and creating conditions for realization of the second demographic dividend.For many years,a large number of domestic and foreign literatures focus on the impact of education human capital on economic growth and labor market performance.Until Becker(1964)and Grossman(1972)build the production function of health human capital and health care,and with the exploration of the health indicators and rich research data sets,literatures focus on the health human capital is increasing gradually.Research shows that health human capital has a significant effect on the economic growth and labor market performances.Health human capital accumulation depends on many factors.Among them,health insurance can promote the demand for healthcare services,and improve health human capital by reducing the cost of medical services.Therefore,improving health human capital helps to improve the labor market performance,while health insurance is an important investment of health human capital,thus there are two logic chains among these three elements.New Cooperative Medical Scheme,has been implemented for more than ten years.Along with the increasing coverage rate,does rural residents' health human capital has been improved correspondingly or not?And does it further promoted the labor market performance or not?These are key problems which the politicians and academics concerned.Based on the China Health and Nutrition Survey(CHNS)data sets,this paper employs difference-in-difference with prosperity score matching(DID-PSM)and BFG to estimate the impact of the NCMS on participants' health human capital and the impact of the health human capital on their labor market performance.The results show that the NCMS significantly improved rural residents' short-term health human capital,especially to the male,the young people and high-income rural residents' short-term health human capital.But the impact of the NCMS on the health human capital of elderly and the low-income rural residents which are relatively more vulnerable is not obvious.In addition,the NCMS promote rural residents' long-term health human capital,but the effect is not yet clear,which is not different in subgroups populations.In further analyses,health human capital is beneficial to promote labor force participation,increasing agricultural labor time and income.However,it has no significant effects on non-agricultural labor time and income.Besides,the decline in long-term health human capital has greater impact on labor force participation than the short-term health human capital.Heterogeneity analyses show that the health human capital has greater impact on labor force participation of the male,middle-aged,high-income rural residents,and greater impact on labor time and labor income of the male,youth,high-income rural residents.Moreover,since NCMS can accept the reimbursement when participants visiting out of hometown,the health human capital is no longer a limiting restriction of rural residents migration.This paper prove that the government invested substantial financial subsidies to achieve full coverage of the rural medical insurance is worth.Under the background of the current demographic structure changing,labor force participation rate is decreasing,the demographic dividend is gradually disappearing.This paper provides a new way of thinking of economic growth changing from relying on the number of human capital to enhance the quality of human capital and excavating the second demographic dividend in China.