公共健康、人力资本与经济增长：中国疾病控制的持久影响
Public Health, Human Capital, and Economic Growth: The Lasting Effects of Disease Control in China
Review of Economics and Statistics · 2026 · [{"name": "Fan He", "affiliation": ["Jiangxi University of Finance and Economics"]}, {"name": "Wei Huang", "affiliation": ["Peking University"]}, {"name": "Yinghao Pan", "affiliation": ["Renmin University of China"]}, {"name": "Jiao Wang", "affiliation": ["Huazhong University of Science and Technology"]}]
中文摘要
摘要 本文考察20世纪60年代至80年代中国针对疟疾、麻疹和脑膜炎的全国性公共卫生运动的长期影响。利用出生队列在运动前疾病流行率上的区域差异，我们发现这些干预在教育、认知、健康和收入方面带来了可观的改善。作为一个说明性案例，来自高疟疾地区且完全暴露于根除运动的个体，成年后受教育年限约增加0.5年、收入提高超过10%，其中认知与受教育年限的提升解释了收入效应中相当大的一部分。将同样的方法扩展到麻疹和脑膜炎疫苗接种运动，发现了同等量级的可观收益，内部收益率介于21%至34%之间。总体而言，这些发现凸显了生命早期健康干预持久的社会经济回报，并强调了公共卫生作为人力资本积累与长期经济增长基础的作用。
Abstract
Abstract This paper investigates the long-term impacts of China’s nationwide public health campaigns targeting malaria, measles, and meningitis between the 1960s and 1980s. Exploiting regional variation in precampaign disease prevalence across birth cohorts, we show that these interventions generated sizable improvements in education, cognition, health, and income. As an illustrative case, individuals from high-malaria regions who were fully exposed to the eradication campaign attained about 0.5 additional years of schooling and earned over 10% higher income in adulthood, with cognitive and schooling gains explaining a substantial share of the income effects. Extending the same approach to measles and meningitis vaccination campaigns reveals comparably large benefits, with internal rates of return ranging from 21% to 34%. Together, these findings highlight the lasting socioeconomic returns to early-life health interventions and underscore the role of public health as a foundation for human capital accumulation and long-run economic growth.