life", such as health and equality of opportunity. However, per capita GDP has the virtues of easy interpretation and can … preserves the advantages of per capita GDP, but also includes health and equality. We propose a new parsimonious indicator to …

Acemoglu and Johnson (2007) present evidence that improvements in population health do not promote economic growth. We … show that their result depends critically on the assumption that initial health has no causal effect on subsequent economic … growth. We argue that such an effect is likely, primarily because childhood health affects adult productivity. In our …

In a recent paper, Acemoglu and Johnson (2007) argue that the large increases in population health witnessed in the 20 … health and income do not affect subsequent economic growth. Using their data we reject this assumption in favor of a model of …, exogenous improvements in health due to technical advances associated with the epidemiological transition appear to have …

caused by worsening health in old age. Our model explains the long-run decline in the age of retirement as an income level … effect. We show that improvements in health and longevity tend to increase the desired retirement age, though less than …