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Over the past 20 years, investment in human resources has taken center stage in the study of developing economies. A voluminous set of wage function estimates provides the basis for calculating market returns to education for virtually every country in the world. Studies have also looked at the effects of schooling on nonmarket outcomes. Prominent among those outcomes is the health of children and adults. Since health, like schooling, is a form of human capital, one might expect it to also be related to labor market success. That link has received much less attention in the empirical literature, although in recent years there have been substantial advances in our understanding of the complex interrelationships between health, nutrition, and economic development. This paper reviews some of the evidence.

There are many reasons why the relationship between health and labor market outcomes in developing …