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Health and Economic Growth in Selected Low Income Countries of African South of the Sahara: Cross Country Evidence Acknowledgment
Södertörns University|Department of Social Sciences| Economics Master Programme, Thesis | 2012 (Frivilligt: Programmet för xxx) Health and Long Run Economic Growth in Selected Low Income Countries of Africa South of the Sahara Cross country panel data analysis By: Liya Frew Tekabe Supervisor: Leo Foderus Handledare: [Handledarens namn (teckenstorlek: 12p)] Health and Economic Growth in selected low income countries of African south of the Sahara: Cross Country Evidence Acknowledgment I am grateful to God who made all the things possible. I would like to thank the people who have helped and supported me not only throughout my project but also for making my stay in Stockholm more pleasant. I am grateful to my Advisor Mr. Leo Foderus for his continuous support & encouragement. I would also like to thank the institute of Södertörns Högskola for providing such an opportunity. Coming to Stockholm for my Msc has been an interesting journey of my life. I have been able to experience different aspect of life, which have helped me become a much stronger person. My deepest gratitude goes to my friends Ahmed Hashim, Fikirte Tegaye, Michael Tedla, Million Kibret and everyone who has contributed in one way or the other in the course of the project. Finally, my dues are to my Parents Frew Tekabe and Abebu Debebe and the rest of my beloved family for the love, support and encouragement. I can’t imagine any of this without your unconditional support. 2 Health and Economic Growth in selected low income countries of African south of the Sahara: Cross Country Evidence Table of Contents Acknowledgment .............................................................................................................................................. -
Robert Fogel Interview
RF Winter 07v43-sig3-INT 2/28/07 11:13 AM Page 44 INTERVIEW Robert Fogel In the early 1960s, few economic historians engaged RF: I understand that your initial academic interests in rigorous quantitative work. Robert Fogel and the were in the physical sciences. How did you become “Cliometric Revolution” he led changed that. Fogel interested in economics, especially economic history? began to use large and often unique datasets to test Fogel: I became interested in the physical sciences while some long-held conclusions — work that produced attending Stuyvesant High School, which was exceptional in some surprising and controversial results. For that area. I learned a lot of physics, a lot of chemistry. I had instance, it was long believed that the railroads had excellent courses in calculus. So that opened the world of fundamentally changed the American economy. science to me. I was most interested in physical chemistry and thought I would major in that in college, but my father said Fogel asked what the economy would have looked that it wasn’t very practical and persuaded me to go into like in their absence and argued that, while important, electrical engineering. I found a lot of those classes boring the effect of rail service had been greatly overstated. because they covered material I already had in high school, so it wasn’t very interesting and my attention started to drift elsewhere. In 1945 and 1946, there was a lot of talk about Fogel then turned to one of the biggest issues in all whether we were re-entering the Great Depression and the of American history — antebellum slavery. -
Gary Becker and the Art of Economics by Aloysius Siow, Professor of Economics, University of Toronto May 24, 2014
Gary Becker and the Art of Economics by Aloysius Siow, Professor of Economics, University of Toronto May 24, 2014. Gary Becker, an American economist, died on May 3, 2014, at the age of 83. His major contribution was the systematic application of economics to the analysis of social issues. He used economics to study discrimination, criminal behavior, human capital, marriage, fertility and other social issues. Becker won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1992. He also won the John Bates Clark medal, awarded to the best American economist under 40, in 1967; and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honor award by the US president to a civilian, in 2007. Becker's father, Louis William Becker, migrated from Montreal to the United States at age sixteen and moved several times before settling down in Pottsville, Pennsylvania. Becker's mother was Anna Siskind. He was born in Pottsville in 1930. At age five, Gary and his family moved to Brooklyn. He graduated from James Madison High School and went to Princeton University for college. He did his PhD at the University of Chicago where he met Milton Friedman who would have an enormous influence on his intellectual development. After he obtained his PhD, Becker spent a few years as an assistant professor at the University of Chicago and then moved to Columbia University. In 1970, Becker returned to the University of Chicago where he remained as a professor until his death. While impressive, a list of what he wrote on does not explain why he is so intellectually influential. His mentor, Friedman, always said that "There is no such thing as a free lunch" and applied it widely in market environments. -
Capabilities, Human Flourishing and the Health Gap Amartya Sen
Capabilities, Human Flourishing and the Health Gap Amartya Sen Lecture HDCA Conference Tokyo 2016 Amartya Sen’s insights have been important to my work in at least four ways: providing intellectual justification for my empirical findings that health can be an “outcome” of social and economic processes; providing insight into the debate on relative or absolute inequality; emphasising the central place of freedoms or agency in human well-being; and alerting me to the importance of the question of “inequality of what”. This last is shameful to admit for someone, me, who had been pursuing research on inequalities in health for two decades before I met Sen in person and in his writings. Could I really be obsessed with health inequalities without recognising that there was more than one way to think about inequality? In this Amartya Sen lecture, I will start by sketching briefly how these seminal ideas of Sen influence what I do. More accurately, I should say how Sen’s ideas influence how I think about what I do. For, as just stated, I had been doing it for some time before I encountered Sen’s fundamental contributions – I am a doctor and medical scientist, after all. In particular, my research on health inequalities has focussed on the social gradient in health, its generalisability, how to understand its causes and what to do about it. I have pursued this research since 1976 when I began work on the first Whitehall study(1), and to think about health inequalities more generally (2). Although I had not used the term, “social determinants of health” until later(3), my research on health inequalities fitted that description, along with the research on health of migrants.(4, 5) I will then illustrate the approach in more detail, drawing on my book, The Health Gap. -
Redrawing the Preston Curve
DATA AND PERSPECTIVES Education and Health: Redrawing the Preston Curve WOLFGANG LUTZ ENDALE KEBEDE PROGRESS IN HUMAN health and life expectancy is closely associated with socioeconomic development. Better nutrition and greater affordability of health care associated with higher income have been widely considered as primary determinants of historical and contemporary mortality declines. McKeown’s (1976) influential book on the modern rise of population at- tributed the secular mortality decline largely to improving standards of liv- ing. Reviewing mortality improvements in Britain during the second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, he argued that medical discoveries were of little consequence for the significant gains in survival during this period. His analysis served as a reference point of Pre- ston’s (1975) article, which is the focus of the present study. Preston showed that the global pattern over the twentieth century indicates an upward shift of the curve that links GDP per person on the horizontal axis and life ex- pectancy on the vertical (Figure 1).1 Preston interpreted this shift as the effect of medical progress and health care over and above the effect of in- come. In many of the studies of this issue that followed Preston’s lead, the assumption that income is the most important driver of mortality decline has been an unquestioned starting point. A very different picture was drawn by Caldwell in a 1986 article on routes to low mortality in poor countries. Based on a major Rockefeller Foundation study on Kerala (India), Sri Lanka, and Costa Rica, Caldwell discussed the factors that led to breakthrough mortality declines in those populations as opposed to others and identified “female autonomy,” which he saw largely as a function of female education, as the single most im- portant factor, together with efficient local health services. -
A Cliometric Counterfactual: What If There Had Been Neither Fogel Nor
A Cliometric Counterfactual: What if There Had Been Neither Fogel nor North? By Claude Diebolt (CNRS, University of Strasbourg) and Michael Haupert (University of Wisconsin-La Crosse Author contact information: [email protected] [email protected] Preliminary draft, please do not quote Abstract 1993 Nobel laureates Robert Fogel and Douglass North were pioneers in the “new” economic history, or cliometrics. Their impact on the economic history discipline is great, though not without its critics. In this essay, we use both the “old” narrative form of economic history, and the “new” cliometric form, to analyze the impact each had on the evolution of economic history. Introduction In December of 1960 the “Purdue Conference on the Application of Economic Theory and Quantitative Techniques to Problems of History” was held on the campus of Purdue University.1 It is recognized as the first meeting of what is now known as the Cliometric Society.2 While it was the first formal meeting of a group of like-minded applicants of economic theory and quantitative methods to the study of economic history, it was not the first time such a concept had been practiced or mentioned in the literature.3 Cliometrics was a long time in coming, but when it arrived, it eventually overran the approach to the discipline of economic history, leading to a bifurcation of the economists and historians who practice the art, and the blurring of the distinction between cliometricians and theorists who use historical data. Clio’s roots are historical in nature, and its focus on theory has actually come full circle over the last century and a half. -
Review of Angus Deaton's the Great Escape
Journal of Economic Literature 2015, 53(1), 102–114 http://dx.doi.org/10.1257/jel.53.1.102 A Review of Angus Deaton’s The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality† David N. Weil* This book explores the relationship between the material standard of living and health, both across countries and over time. Above all, Deaton is interested in the question of whether income growth contributes significantly to better health. His answer is no: saving lives in poor countries is not expensive, and there are many episodes of massive health improvements in the absence of income growth. As an alternative, he argues that the cross-sectional correlation between health and income is induced by variation in institutional quality, while over time, parallel improvements in income and health have been a result of advancing knowledge. (JEL E23, I12, I14, I15, O15, O47) 1. Introduction of GDP per capita, for which we can calcu- late compound growth rates and, with some- obert Lucas famously wrote of eco- what more difficulty, make comparisons Rnomic growth that once you start think- across countries. Another dimension along ing about it, it is hard to think about anything which there has been enormous change over else. But what is economic growth? One time is human health. Reminding oneself of aspect of growth is change in the goods the ubiquity of premature death, suffering, and services that an economy produces. and disability that characterized the lives of Compared to our ancestors, or to most of the previous generations, and that still charac- other residents of our planet, those of us who terizes the lives of many people in develop- live in developed countries today enjoy the ing countries today, is a good way to get some benefits of a much better consumption bas- perspective on the importance of income as ket: big houses, cars, air conditioning, restau- measured in conventional GDP.1 rant meals, and so on. -
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Department of Economics Working Paper Series
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Department of Economics Working Paper Series The Rise and Fall of Economic History at MIT Peter Temin Working Paper 13-11 June 5, 2013 Rev: December 9, 2013 Room E52-251 50 Memorial Drive Cambridge, MA 02142 This paper can be downloaded without charge from the Social Science Research Network Paper Collection at http://ssrn.com/abstract=2274908 The Rise and Fall of Economic History at MIT Peter Temin MIT Abstract This paper recalls the unity of economics and history at MIT before the Second World War, and their divergence thereafter. Economic history at MIT reached its peak in the 1970s with three teachers of the subject to graduates and undergraduates alike. It declined until economic history vanished both from the faculty and the graduate program around 2010. The cost of this decline to current education and scholarship is suggested at the end of the narrative. Key words: economic history, MIT economics, Kindleberger, Domar, Costa, Acemoglu JEL codes: B250, N12 Author contact: [email protected] 1 The Rise and Fall of Economic History at MIT Peter Temin This paper tells the story of economic history at MIT during the twentieth century, even though roughly half the century precedes the formation of the MIT Economics Department. Economic history was central in the development of economics at the start of the century, but it lost its primary position rapidly after the Second World War, disappearing entirely a decade after the end of the twentieth century. I taught economic history to MIT graduate students in economics for 45 years during this long decline, and my account consequently contains an autobiographical bias. -
Health, Inequality, and Economic Development Angus Deaton Research Program in Development Studies and Center for Health and Well
Health, inequality, and economic development Angus Deaton Research Program in Development Studies and Center for Health and Wellbeing Princeton University May 2001 Prepared for Working Group 1 of the WHO Commission on Macroeconomics and Health. I am grateful to Anne Case for many helpful discussions during the preparation of this paper and to Sir George Alleyne, David Cutler and Duncan Thomas for comments on a preliminary draft. I am grateful for financial support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and from the National Institute of Aging through a grant to the National Bureau of Economic Research. Health, inequality, and economic development Angus Deaton JEL No. I12 ABSTRACT I explore the connection between income inequality and health in both poor and rich countries. I discuss a range of mechanisms, including nonlinear income effects, credit restrictions, nutritional traps, public goods provision, and relative deprivation. I review the evidence on the effects of income inequality on the rate of decline of mortality over time, on geographical pattens of mortality, and on individual-level mortality. Much of the literature needs to be treated skeptically, if only because of the low quality of much of the data on income inequality. Although there are many puzzles that remain, I conclude that there is no direct link from income inequality to ill-health; individuals are no more likely to die if they live in more unequal places. The raw correlations that are sometimes found are likely the result of factors other than income inequality, some of which are intimately linked to broader notions of inequality and unfairness. -
Robert Fogel Interview
RF Winter 07v43-sig3-INT 2/28/07 11:13 AM Page 44 CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk Provided by Research Papers in EconomicsINTERVIEW Robert Fogel In the early 1960s, few economic historians engaged RF: I understand that your initial academic interests in rigorous quantitative work. Robert Fogel and the were in the physical sciences. How did you become “Cliometric Revolution” he led changed that. Fogel interested in economics, especially economic history? began to use large and often unique datasets to test Fogel: I became interested in the physical sciences while some long-held conclusions — work that produced attending Stuyvesant High School, which was exceptional in some surprising and controversial results. For that area. I learned a lot of physics, a lot of chemistry. I had instance, it was long believed that the railroads had excellent courses in calculus. So that opened the world of fundamentally changed the American economy. science to me. I was most interested in physical chemistry and thought I would major in that in college, but my father said Fogel asked what the economy would have looked that it wasn’t very practical and persuaded me to go into like in their absence and argued that, while important, electrical engineering. I found a lot of those classes boring the effect of rail service had been greatly overstated. because they covered material I already had in high school, so it wasn’t very interesting and my attention started to drift elsewhere. In 1945 and 1946, there was a lot of talk about Fogel then turned to one of the biggest issues in all whether we were re-entering the Great Depression and the of American history — antebellum slavery. -
Two Appreciations
This PDF is a selection from an out-of-print volume from the National Bureau of Economic Research Volume Title: Strategic Factors in Nineteenth Century American Economic History: A Volume to Honor Robert W. Fogel Volume Author/Editor: Claudia Goldin and Hugh Rockoff, editors Volume Publisher: University of Chicago Press Volume ISBN: 0-226-30112-5 Volume URL: http://www.nber.org/books/gold92-1 Conference Date: March 1-3, 1991 Publication Date: January 1992 Chapter Title: Two Appreciations Chapter Author: Stanley L. Engerman, Donald N. McCloskey Chapter URL: http://www.nber.org/chapters/c6956 Chapter pages in book: (p. 9 - 25) Two Appreciations Stanley L. Engerman Donald N. McCloskey Stanley L. Engerman Robert William Fogel: An Appreciation by a Coauthor and Colleague Sometime in either late 1974 or 1975 I ran across a friend who had just seen a Hollywood musical. It was in the genre of the complications of song-writing partners for whom output required some joint contributions and interactions. This led him to wonder what scholarly work under similar circumstances was like, since both activities were done frequently by individuals but collabora- tions occurred with sufficient frequency that they were not unusual. In partic- ular, he wondered how Bob and I had begun working together and what was the nature of the input on Time on the Cross and our dealing with the related conferences and responses. I doubt if I fully answered his queries-some things are more easily done than described-but, in reflecting on this encoun- ter, certain aspects of our working together did come to mind. -
Economics 213 Spring 2013 ‐1‐
Economics 213 Spring 2013 ‐1‐ Methods and Themes in Economic History Instructor: Mr. Ransom Class Meetings: Tuesday/Thursday 5:10 – 6:30 Office: HMNSS 3303 Office Hours: TBA E‐mail: [email protected] Introduction In February 1960 Lance Davis and J.R.T. Hughes organized a conference at Purdue University to present papers dealing with the “new” economic history. Legend has it that Stanley Reiter, a mathematical economist, who was "musing" for a word that described the quantitative economic history work he was discussing with colleagues at the conference, joined the Muse of History, Clio, with the suffix metrics (from econometrics) to get the word Cliometrics. Later that same year, Douglass North and William Parker, both of whom were at the Purdue conference, became editors of the Journal of Economic History – the professional journal published by the Economic History Association. The Purdue Conference and the JEH editorship of North and Parker proved to be jumping off points for the creation of an entirely new field of scholarly inquiry. In 1993 the Nobel Prize in Economics was shared by North and Robert Fogel for their research as “pioneers in the branch of economic history that has been called the ‘new economic history’ or ‘cliometrics.’ The Nobel committee’s award was a formal recognition that cliometrics had come of age as an academic field in the discipline of economics. In the Spring of 2011, the Cliometrics Society held its 50th anniversary Conference at Boulder Colorado. In this course we will explore the a small sample of research conducted by cliometricians over the past 50 years.