城镇化如何影响了居民的健康?

The Impact of Urbanization on Health in China

健康是人力资本的重要组成部分,城镇化对居民健康的影响是推进"人的城镇化"过程中的一个重要问题。一方面,城镇化提高了人们的收入,使更多的人可以获得充足的营养和先进的医疗设施,对健康有正面作用。另一方面,城镇化带来医疗资源的拥挤、医疗价格的上升及环境污染,则可能对健康产生负面影响。本文利用宏观统计数据和多个有代表性的微观调查数据研究发现,居民所在地的城镇化水平越高,城镇户籍居民、农村居民以及省内农民工的综合健康水平都越低。本文进而从收入、医疗卫生和环境污染这几个角度进一步分析了可能的影响机制。城镇化对健康的负面效果在整体上超过了因收入增加、营养改善、医疗设施增加等带来的正面影响,这是值得注意的发现。

Health is an important component of human capital,and should be one of the key focuses in China′s urbanization process. This paper conducts a comprehensive examination on the impact of urbanization on health using various data. On one hand,urbanization incresases income level,provides advanced medical services to more people,and makes health-related consumptions more affordable. On the other hand,the increase of urban medical resources lag behind the increase of population and become more crowded.Together with the deteriorated environmet and pollution,urbanization could have negative consequences on health. This paper find that a higher level of urbanizaton worsens the health status for urban local residents,migrants within provinces,and rural residents as well. We further analyze the possible mechanisms for this negative effect,including income,medical expenditure and pollution.