Contributions of Healthcare to Economic Development, Case Study of a Rural Community in Ghana
Author(s)
Michael Verner Menyah , Jincai Zhuang , Charles Dwumfour Osei , Albert Henry Ntarmah , Samuel Gyedu ,
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Abstract
the relationship between healthcare and economic development has been intensively investigated by various scholars over the years. Most of these studies however focused on the contribution of economic development to the improvement in health care delivery without looking at the role of good health are a catalyst to economic development. The major purpose of this article is to outline role of good health in economic development using various health indicators like mortality rate, disease prevalence rate, life expectancy and social infrastructure development. The paper adopted the Confirmatory Factor Approach (CFA) and Hierarchical Multiple Regression (HMR) to investigate the objective of the study among 1107 residents in the Oforikrom Municipal Assembly in the Ashanti region of Ghana.
The study revealed that economic growth is expressively driven by health, both in the short and long run which implies that improvement in health status of the population raises output in the economy, stabilize the economy and in turn ensures a sustained economic performance in all sectors. The results conformed with the existing empirical evidence on the relationship between health and economic growth, they, however, are more robust due to the presence of long-term data, appropriate econometric procedure and alternate model specifications
Based on the above empirical evidence gathered by the study, it is highly recommended that stakeholders and policy influencers make a conscious effort to develop policies aimed at raising health sector investment and social infrastructure development as well as strengthen the healthcare system to improve health status which will in turn have a trickling effect on the overall economic performance of economies
Keywords
healthcare, economic growth, rural community, HRM
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