Health Capital and Health Wealth
Health Capital and Health Wealth

Author(s): Julia M. Puaschunder
Subject(s): Business Economy / Management, Law on Economics
Published by: Scientia Moralitas Research Institute
Keywords: Banking; Economics; Finance; Health; Healthcare; Investment
Summary/Abstract: We live in the age of responsible investment. The time for a reset of finance after the 2008 World Financial Recession and the 2020 global pandemic has come. In the aftermath of two major economic crises, the societal call for responsible market behavior has reached unprecedented momentum. As the novel Coronavirus (SARS-COV-2) hit the world, the external economic shock has widespread implications for finance and economics. In the eye of a worldwide healthcare crisis impacting economics on a massive scale, the need for understanding the connection between health and capital on the individual, nuclear family level, corporate community standards and conduct as well as the overall economy became blatant. Interestingly, in the individual finance and investment literature, personal expenses due to sickness and work impairments due to chronic diseases are hardly mentioned. On the family level, unhealthy individual dynamics may lead to additional cognitive complexity that deters from reaching full productive potential as well as may cause critical life events, such as divorce, which can have drastic financial outcomes with long-term implications. On the corporate level, COVID-19 has opened the gates for corporations focusing on the overall health status of employees fostering prevention and health safety precautions as never before in the history of industrialization. Lastly, over entire populations, there is a strong connection between health levels and productivity, which directly influences the Gross Domestic Product of countries. Despite all the mentioned connections, hardly any economic literature concerns the dependence of health on the Keynesian multiplier. Governmental money spent on healthcare may have a multiplied multiplier effect on the overall economy but – to this day – economic literature remains scarce on the economic effect of healthcare-dependent multipliers. Attention to the importance of health and well-being for individual financial success, familial functioning as well as entire populations and overlapping generations may innovatively leverage health capital and health wealth into a category of Socially Responsible Investment and Sustainable Finance in the post-COVID-19 era.

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