Human development considered as the engine of the economic
growth as it improves the economy’s strength and increases the standard
of living of the people, increases the choices and maximises the welfare
of the society that is the prime objective of any government. The
development of the human capabilities is also necessary for the
sustainable growth, as there are many channels through which human
development foster the economic growth. It increases the labour
productivity, labour demand, employment and output. On the other hand,
human capital also attracts physical capital.1 Empirically, it is very
difficult to have an exact measure of human development and social
welfare. Several proxies used to measure human development, e.g. GNI per
capita as a measure of standard of living, Purchasing Power Parity (PPP)
criterion to measure the cost of living and to measure the welfare,
average year of schooling, school enrolment rate and health expenditures
as a percentage of GDP to capture this composite welfare and development
indicator. A fair index of Human Development Index (HDI) was developed
by United Nations Development Programme in 1990. This index based on the
standard of living (natural logarithm of GDP PPP per capita), access to
knowledge (adult literacy rate with two-third weighting and the
remaining is the gross enrolment ratio) and a healthy life (life
expectancy at birth). The value of index varies from 0 to 1, lower the
HDI, lesser would be the human development and welfare in the country or
vice versa.
The successive economic and financial crisis in recent time
has reemphasised the importance of fiscal policy. Modern literature has
also revisited the debate regarding the effectiveness of fiscal policy
in influencing growth. The issue of the impact of public investment on
growth is debated in economic literature since seminal work of Solow
(1955). The issue is tackled from different angles. Some have used
production function approach [Ligthart (2002), Otto and Voss (1994,
1996), Sturm and de Haan (1995) and Wang (2004)]. Then another seminal
work by Aschauer (1989) led a series of work on this issue once again in
empirical literature (1989a, 1989b). These approaches used single
equation method for estimation and captured only the direct effects of
public investment on growth. Periera (2000) gave another twist to this
literature by highlighting the indirect effects of public investment on
output through its effects on other inputs like private investment and
employment. Periera’s works (1999, 2000, 2001, 2003, 2005, 2007 and
2011) also contributed empirically to this literature by using vector
autoregressive (VAR) technique. This work accounts for both the direct
and indirect effects of public investment on growth and also considers
the feedback effects of each input to other and finally their effects on
output
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