Abstract
This paper surveys several important researches which focus on 'health' from an economic standpoint and evaluates their academic contribution with a focus on recent studies.In the typical analyses of health research in Economics, health is regarded as a part of human capital enhancing people's productivity and the impacts on labor productivity or national growth are examined. Human capital theory by Gary, Becker and Michael Grossman have been prompting many empirical researches which examine the relationships between people's health and their productivity.Nevertheless, the health studies have been increasingly diverse, and interestingly, several researchers have begun to focus on the role of regional and companies' factors for health status in addition to people's socio-economic status. Furthermore, in the field of Health Economics, the methods of economic valuation such as cost-benefit analysis and cost-utility analysis are utilized for evaluating the social security systems like public health insurance system and medical services.Currently, several fields of researchers are actively conducting collaborative researches to deal with more sophisticated and specialized health research issues. It is expected that the integration of various fields of academic studies is prompted in order to analyze the determinants of health and to get a better grasp regarding the multiple effects.
