Economic Implications of Health Care Burden for Elderly Population

The implications of population aging for economic growth is not only the shrinking working-age population, but also the increasing health care burden of the elderly population. It is difficult to explain clearly the relationship between a country’s aging population and its economy without considering health effects. Based on the Solow economic growth model, the aims of this study are to estimate the economic effects of the health care burden for elderly population, and to access whether reducing effective labor input for economic production. The analysis employs a set of econometric approaches including fixed effects, generalized method of moments, instrumental variable, and mediation regression analyses using a multinational multi-database covering the years 2000-2019. The empirical evidence indicates that the health care burden was negatively correlated with economic growth during the study period, with every 1% increase in the health care burden leading to a 0.083% decrease in the GDP growth rate. The results of heterogeneity analysis and mediating analysis further confirmed that worsening health in the elderly population could be associated with the deceleration in economic development through the indirect pathway that lowering the employment rate of working-age population. This study provides new empirical evidence on the economic impact of population aging that the poor health of elderly population can be one critical factor of limiting economic growth, for the reason the labor inputs in household production are likely crowded out by family caregiving.