The concept of poverty has evolved over time and has now become a generalized notion covering material well-being, social well-being, physical well-being, security, freedom of action and lack of political power. Each dimension is generally not captured adequately by a single indicator and hence the number of variables measuring the level of development tends to proliferate. The first part of the thesis examines whether some subset of these factors are driving all others using conventional linear data reduction techniques and also using methods borrowed from the study of ~actals which capture some of the non-Iinearities in the relationships. The focus in the rest of the thesis moves to the particular relationship between health and income. While the traditional view was that economic growth improved health, recent research argues for the reverse direction of causation. In agreement with other literature, income is found to be a unit root process using a panel dataset. However, this thesis is unique as far as the author is aware in testing for unit roots in life expectancy and finding non-stationarity. This result was found to be robust to null hypotheses of stationarity or non-stationarity. Another significant contribution to the literature is that cointegration is found between health and income using the panel test given by Kao {1999}. The long-run relationship between the variables was then estimated using panel dynamic OLS which adjusts for possible endogeneity and serial correlation. The existence of cointegration implies causation and the direction of causality was explored in the final section. Life expectancy was found to be responding endogenously to changes in income while evidence of the reverse direction of causation was more ambiguous.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:491941 |
| Date | January 2008 |
| Creators | French, Declan |
| Publisher | Queen's University Belfast |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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