Disease has traveled with goods and people since the earliest times. Armed globalization spread disease, to the extent of eliminating entire populations. The geography of disease shaped patterns of colonization and industrialization throughout the now poor world. Many see related threats to...

Health and wealth are the two most important components of well-being. Rankings of well-being based on income will differ from more comprehensive rankings depending on the way that income and health are related. There are strong bidirectional causal links between income and health so that we...

In spite of India’s rapid economic growth, there has been a sustained decline in per capita calorie consumption during the last twenty-five years. While the decline has been largest among better-off households, it has taken place throughout the range of household per capita total expenditure....

I present a model of mortality and income which attempts to integrate the “gradient,” the negative relationship between income and mortality, with the Wilkinson hypothesis, that income inequality poses a risk to health. I postulate that individual health is negatively affected by relative...

This paper explores the relationship between adult heights and the distribution of income across populations of individuals. There is a long literature that examines the relationship between mean adult heights and living standards. If adult height is set by the balance between food intake and...

We investigate the childhood determinants of adult height in populations, focusing on the respective roles of income and of disease. We develop a model of selection and scarring, in which the early life burden of nutrition and disease is not only responsible for mortality in childhood but also...

We investigate age-specific mortality in Britain and the United States since 1950. Neither trends in income nor in income inequality provide plausible explanations. Britain and the US had different patterns of income growth but similar patterns of mortality decline. Patterns of income inequality...

This paper presents a new set of integrated poverty and inequality estimates for India and Indian states for 1987-88, 1993-94 and 1999-2000. The poverty estimates are broadly consistent with independent evidence on per-capita expenditure, state domestic product and real agricultural wages. They...

Poverty is a complex phenomenon involving multiple dimensions of deprivation, of which the lack of goods and services is only one. Even so, there is a good deal of consensus on the value of using a consumption aggregate as a summary measure of living standards, itself an important component of...