TY  - JOUR
AU  - Bloom,David E.
AU  - Canning,David
AU  - Fink,Günther
TI  - Disease and Development Revisited
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 15137
PY  - 2009
Y2  - July 2009
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w15137
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w15137.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
David E. Bloom
Harvard School of Public Health
Department of Global Health and Population
665 Huntington Ave.
Boston, MA 02115
Tel: 617/432-0866
Fax: 617/432-6733
E-Mail: dbloom@hsph.harvard.edu

David Canning
Harvard School of Public Health
Department of Global Health and Population
665 Huntington Ave.
Boston, MA 02115
Tel: 617/432-6336
Fax: 617/566-0365
E-Mail: dcanning@hsph.harvard.edu

Günther Fink
Harvard School of Public Health
Department of Global Health and Population
665 Huntington Ave.
Boston, MA 02115
E-Mail: gfink@hsph.harvard.edu
AB  - In a recent paper, Acemoglu and Johnson (2007) argue that the large increases in population health witnessed in the 20th century may have lowered income levels. We argue that this result depends crucially on their assumption that initial health and income do not affect subsequent economic growth. Using their data we reject this assumption in favor of a model of conditional convergence, with income adjusting to its steady state over time. We show that, allowing for conditional convergence, exogenous improvements in health due to technical advances associated with the epidemiological transition appear to have increased income levels.
ER  -