Good health is a crucial part of well-being but spending on health can be justified on economic grounds. The goal of … reducing poverty provides a different but equally powerful case for health investments. However, if policymakers are to … accelerate the substantial health gains of recent decades, especially for the poor in African countries such as Nigeria, the …

growth, focusing on the e ects of declining mortality. Unlike the existing literature, this paper stresses the role of … precautionary demand for children. As the mortality rate and thus uncertainty falls, this demand decreases. Furthermore, lower … mortality encourages educational investment in children. The key result is that this empirically observed quality-quantity trade …

We examine the role of changing mortality in explaining the rise of retirement over the course of the 20th century. We … of death. In an environment in which mortality is high, an individual who saved up for retirement would face a high risk …. As mortality falls, however, it becomes optimal to plan, and save for, retirement. We simulate our model using actual …

This paper analyzes qualitatively and quantitatively the e ects of declining mortality rates on fertility, education … survival, a decline in an exogenous mortality rate reduces precautionary demand for children and increases parental investment … in each child. Once mortality is endogenized, population growth becomes a hump-shaped function of income per capita. At …

We set up an open-economy, three-country version of the endogenous- mortality model of Lagerloef (forthcoming in the … International Economic Review). The model is calibrated to pre-industrial mortality data from England, France and Sweden. Fitting … parameters to match observed rates of correlation in mortality rates, the model can also account for: (1) differences in the …

A number of recent studies have illustrated the link between health and growth (Gallup and Sachs 2000, McCarthy et al …. 2000, Bhargava et al. 2000). This paper argues that a key mechanism through which health affects growth is via total factor … particular attention to three indicators of health that are particularly problematic in developing regions: malnutrition, malaria …

economic slowdowns are good for health. In contrast, at least overweight increases during slumps. …