Health plays an important role in promoting human capital and the economic growth of a country (Bloom & Canning, 2003). The available stock of human capital of a country determines the rates of growth in its per capita income (Gyimah-Brempong & Wilson, 2004).The healthy individual contributes more to their economy, by allocating more hours to work, earning more disposable income and inturns investing more in human development (Bloom et al., 2004). In Grossman's seminal work, an individual stock of health tends to diminish over time and can be augmented by investment in time, income and regular medical care (Grossman, 1972). The neoclassical model of economic growth argues that improvement in the quality of human capital stock increases income per capita in the long run (Romer, 2012). Currently, the crux of sustainable development requires improvement in the state of health of the entire population (WHO, 2020).However, among the countries of the Association of Southeast Asia (ASEA), between 2005 and 2016, public health expenditure per capita grew by 80.6% which was comparatively below the level of health expenditure growth in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries, that is 111.0%. By contrast, in South Asia, public health expenditure per capita grew by 149.4% which substantially exceeds the level of health expenditure

This study assesses and compares the productive efficiency of the national healthcare system of the ASEAN region which includes Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam amidst rising mortality rate from noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) era. Nonparametric data envelopment analysis technique based on the Malmquist Productivity Index is performed and its components, total factor productivity change, technical change and technological change are compared across the region. Two different models are considered in assessing and comparing the technical efficiency of the national healthcare system across the region with life expectancy at birth and mortality rate from NCDs as parallel health care output for both the models. The mean value of total factor productivity is 0.983 and 0.974 which suggests that national healthcare system productivity efficiency decays by 1.7% for Model I and 2.6% for Model II, respectively. This suggests that the health care system inefficiencies across the ASEAN region have not made life expectancy to improve as much as it should be and curtailed the mortality rate from growing chronic NCDs within a decade. The region is likely to lag behind in achieving SDGs 3 target 4 on reducing by one‐third premature mortality from chronic NCDs unless the health care system's technical efficiency is improved across the region. The finding suggests a microlevel study on each country to identify major sources of healthcare system inefficiency in a bid to ameliorate it.

The importance of infrastructure for sustained economic development is well recognized. High transaction costs arising from inadequate and inefficient infrastructure can prevent the economy from realising its full growth potential regardless of the progress on other fronts. Physical infrastructure covering transportation, power and communication through its backward and forward linkages facilitates growth, social infrastructure including water supply, sanitation, sewage disposal, education and health, which are in the nature of primary services and has a direct impact on the quality of life. The performance of infrastructure is largely a reflection of the performance of the economy. Infrastructure industries are measured by six key infrastructure and core industries (i.e., electricity, crude oil, petroleum refinery products, coal, steel and cement). In this paper, the overall growth and performance of infrastructure services has been examined in depth on the basis of the different parameters such as trends in growth of physical output in infrastructure sectors, telecommunications, power, ports, railways, civil aviation, and post so as to examine whether there is a negative or positive association between infrastructure development and India's economic growth. t Shailender Singh is a Lecturer of Finance at the Academy of Management Studies, Dehradun. t G. S. Batra is a Professor at the Punjab School of Management Studies, Punjabi University, Patiala.t Gajendra Singh is a Reader

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