Disease burdens, health capital and economic development

The constantly increasing co-integration of economic and ecological systems critically requires a careful consideration of how their dynamics are interlinked, an issue of most pressing concern today. Standard measurements and indicators of human development, such as the gross domestic product and human development index, completely ignore the large set of second-order effects that such development generates, and do not include the social worth of an economy's entire set of capital assets, including the population's health capital, its natural capital, and the rich set of dynamics generated by their coexistence. The issue is of great importance and of very large scope: it has been noted that both theory and empirical studies should substantially alter the way we interpret the progress and regress of nations (Dasgupta (2013)). My research aim is therefore to address this issue by theoretical considerations and by empirical estimates of two of its many factors which are not of direct observability and measurability: the consequences that inequality, urban and agricultural development have on diseases such as malaria, schistosomiasis and cholera, and the nations' health capital. Both research topics will continue and extend from my previous work, which joins risk analysis and stochastic control within the standard economic optimization models with the ecological models of disease transmission. The first part of the research (the disease and development tradeoff) aims to quantify how certain developmental channels can generate second-order effects of ecosystem modification leading to the spreading of diseases: malaria and schistosomiasis with water resources development, and cholera with inequality-generated living conditions and behavioral practices. The existing literature is mostly empirical, therefore the creation of a structural framework would allow to generalize the existing results, as well as allow forecasting as an additional policy tool. The second part aims to create a measure of a country's health capital which is consistent with the behavior of individuals having to choose between investing in capital and investing in health. My work would expand the current literature to a stochastic framework which includes the explicit inclusion of random health shocks in an individual's investment policies. This would fill a research gap in a direction that is generally regarded as the next frontier in the literature.