An assesment of the effect of health and nutritional quality on worker effort and economic growth through physical and human capital: Cross-country and Turkish evidence

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Tezin Türü: Doktora

Tezin Yürütüldüğü Kurum: Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi, İktisadi ve İdari Bilimler Fakültesi, İktisat Bölümü, Türkiye

Tezin Onay Tarihi: 2008

Öğrenci: KAHRAMAN KALYONCU

Danışman: ERKAN ERDİL

Özet:

This dissertation aims to provide evidence on the inter-relationship between per-capita income variation and worker effort indices through nutritional intakes or income to food expenditure ratio. Based on these worker effort indices, there are two data sets; 69 countries data for the year 1980, 1990 and 2000 and 17 regionalized Turkish provinces data for 1994 and 2003. One major contribution is the definition of human and physical capital interactions since accumulation of human capital (H) and physical capital (K) depends on each other within a given technology. This is called “complementary interaction”. Therefore, we emphasize K and H ratios are key factors in an economy rather than the absolute sizes. Another our main contribution to the literature is the data sources we employ. The 1980, 1990 and 2000 data are the first in the literature for 69 countries and more importantly, it is the first study for Turkish provincial level. While some studies are held for particular countries in terms of health proxy levels, there is no such study of any type pertaining to the Turkish economy. Our health proxies empirically play a very important role in our economic growth study. While health proxies make an important contribution in explaining income disparity approach, we do not see such effect on the convergence rate.