Returns to Health Improvement: The Impact on Wages in Egypt’s Private Sector

Document Type : Original Article

Author

Business School, University of Hertfordshire Hosted by the Global Academic Foundation

Abstract

Health is hypothesised to positively affect wages of individuals through an enhancement of their productivity levels. Using a self-perceived measure of health, which rates an individual's own health state from excellent to very bad, based on the postulated positive relationship between better health and productivity improvements, and Egypt’s labour market data for the years 2012 and 2018 and utilising a Maximum Likelihood Estimation method, we address two issues, the endogeneity of health in the estimation of wages and a sample selection bias. Our findings indicate the great value that better health has in enhancing wage levels in Egypt’s private sector. Also, we find that overlooking the endogeneity of health under-estimates its effect on wages, but the effect of the sample selection bias seems insignificant. Thus, the improvement of health states is likely to be beneficial in improving labour market outcomes, in terms of wages as well as labour productivity, in Egypt.

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