Impact of economic growth on district level health outcomes in India

Abstract

Economic growth is believed to have some effect on human indicators such as child mortality in a country however scholars like Amartya Sen have ar-gued that economic growth is a means to an end and not the end in and of itself (Sen (2011)). In this work we propose to evaluate the size of the im- provements in human indicators, specically, health outcomes for infants and children, that we can expect to see and to identify what proportion of that may be attributable to individual characteristics verses those attributable to economy wide measures such as the level of the economy (GDP) and its growth. We explicitly focus on children since childhood is a particularly vul-nerable age group and reasonably under focussed policy target (Gordon et al. (2003)).