The Nexus between Population Growth Rates, Number of Registered Doctors, Number of Health Complexes and Economic Growth in Bangladesh: A VECM Analysis

Abstract

The aims of this paper were to investigate the impacts of the number of registered doctors, number of thana health complexes, and population growth rates on economic growth, to determine the responses of economic growth due to shocks in independent variables, and to illustrate the fluctuations of economic growth due to shocks in independent variables in the short run and long run. Annual time series data were used for the study from 1980 to 2016. Augmented Dicky-Fuller test was applied to check the annual time series data are stationary or not. Johansen test was used to investigate the long-run relationship among the variables. Applying VECM I have seen that in the long run the impacts of the number of registered doctors and population growth rates on economic growth were negative while it was positive for the number of health complexes. On the other hand, in the short run, the impacts of population growth rates and the number of health complexes were positive on economic growth and the impact of the number of registered doctors was negative. Analyzing impulse response function (IRF) I have observed that the responses of gross domestic product due to shocks in the number of registered doctors, number of health complexes, and population growth rates were positive and increasing. Employing the variance decomposition model I have found that in the long run for the number of registered doctors and population growth rates, fluctuations of the gross domestic product increased significantly. But for the number of health complexes, fluctuations of the gross domestic product remained constant for the long run.