Among Africa’s problems, chronic poverty and poor health stand out. Traditional development thinking has maintained that health improvements are a consequence of income growth. But new evidence shows that investing in health, with the aid of the international community, could make a big...

Despite advances during the twentieth century, immunization coverage is far from universal and faces significant obstacles in both developing and developed countries. Weak policy emphasis on vaccination may be the result of the narrow view of its benefits in scientific and policy-making...

We find that a cross-country model of economic growth successfully tracks the growth takeoffs in China and India. The major drivers of the predicted takeoffs are improved health, increased openness to trade, and a rising labor force-to-population ratio due to fertility decline. We also explore...

The share of the population aged 60 and over is projected to increase in nearly every country in the world during the period 2005--50. Population ageing will tend to lower both labour-force participation and savings rates, thereby raising concerns about a future slowing of economic growth. Our...

We use data from the Cebu Longitudinal Health and Nutrition Survey (CLHNS) in the Philippines to link vaccination in the first 2 years of life with later physical and cognitive development in children. We use propensity score matching to estimate the causal effect of vaccination on child...

Falling mortality rates spurred by medical, nutritional and lifestyle changes have spurred a ‘demographic transition’ in a majority of the world’s countries. As couples realize their children are more likely to survive, they need, and eventually have, fewer of them to attain...

We develop an optimizing life-cycle model of retirement with perfect capital markets. We show that longer healthy life expectancy usually leads to later retirement, but with an elasticity less than unity. We calibrate our model using data from the US and find that, over the last century, the...