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To purchase or authenticate to the full-text of this article, please visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9957.2008.01073.x Byline: DAVID CANNING (1), PETER PEDRONI (*) Abstract: We investigate the consequences of various types of infrastructure provision in a panel of countries from 1950 to 1992. We develop new tests which enable us to isolate the sign and direction of long-run effects in a manner that is robust to the presence of unknown heterogeneous short-run causal relationships. We show that while infrastructure does tend to cause long-run economic growth, there is substantial variation across countries. We also provide evidence that each infrastructure type is provided at close to the growth-maximizing level on average globally, but is under-supplied in some countries and over-supplied in others. Author Affiliation: (1)Harvard University (2)Williams College

To link to full-text access for this article, visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jmoneco.2006.12.004 Byline: David E. Bloom (a), David Canning (a), Richard K. Mansfield (b), Michael Moore (c) Keywords: Savings; Demographic change; Population economics; Social security systems Abstract: In theory, improvements in healthy life expectancy should generate increases in the average age of retirement, with little effect on savings rates. In many countries, however, retirement incentives in social security programs prevent retirement ages from keeping pace with changes in life expectancy, leading to an increased need for life-cycle savings. Analyzing a cross-country panel of macroeconomic data, we find that increased longevity raises aggregate savings rates in countries with universal pension coverage and retirement incentives, though the effect disappears in countries with pay-as-you-go systems and high replacement rates. Author Affiliation: (a) Harvard University, School of Public Health, 667 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA 02115, USA (b) Yale University, USA (c) Queen's University, Belfast, Northern Irelank, UK Article History: Received 4 October 2006; Revised 16 November 2006; Accepted 6 December 2006 Article Note: (footnote) [star] Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Center for Population Economics workshop at the University of Chicago, and the 2006 annual meeting of the Population Association of America. The authors are grateful to John Laitner for thoughtful comments, and to Meghan Tieu for excellent research assistance. The National Institute of Aging provided support for this research (Grant no. 1 P30 AG024409-01).

Economic aspects of prevention of infection by the Human Immunodeficiency Virus, which causes the Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome in low-income countries, by using various techniques, are discussed.

To link to full-text access for this article, visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2005.09.006 Byline: Marcella Alsan, David E. Bloom, David Canning Keywords: population health; foreign direct investment; human capital; low- and middle-income countries Abstract: This paper investigates the effect of population health on gross inflows of foreign direct investment (FDI). We conduct a panel data analysis of 74 industrialized and developing countries over 1980-2000. Our main finding is that gross inflows of FDI are strongly and positively influenced by population health in low- and middle-income countries. Our estimates suggest that raising life expectancy by one year increases gross FDI inflows by 9%, after controlling for other relevant variables. These findings are consistent with the view that health is an integral component of human capital for developing countries. Author Affiliation: Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, MA, USA Article History: Accepted 23 September 2005

We estimate a production function model of aggregate economic growth including two variables that microeconomists have identified as fundamental components of human capital: work experience and health. Our main result is that good health has a positive, sizable, and statistically significant effect on aggregate output even when we control for experience of the workforce. We argue that the life expectancy effect in growth regressions appears to be a real labor productivity effect, and is not the result of life expectancy acting as a proxy for worker experience. Key words--economic growth, international health

Byline: David E. Bloom (1), David Canning (1), Jaypee Sevilla (1) Keywords: multiple equilibria; convergence clubs Abstract: We test the view that the large differences in income levels we see across the world are due to differences in the intrinsic geography of each country against the alternative view that there are poverty traps. We reject simple geographic determinism in favor of a poverty trap model with high- and low-level equilibria. The high-level equilibrium state is found to be the same for all countries while income in the low-level equilibrium, and the probability of being in the high-level equilibrium, are greater in cool, coastal countries with high, year-round, rainfall. Author Affiliation: (1) Harvard School of Public Health, USA Article History: Registration Date: 06/10/2004

We examine the dynamic optimization problem for not-for-profit financial institutions (NFPs) that maximize consumer surplus, not profits. We characterize the optimal dynamic policy and find that it involves credit rationing. Interest rates set by mature NFPs will typically be more favorable to customers than market rates, as any surplus is distributed in the form of interest rate subsidies, with credit rationing being required to prevent these subsidies from distorting loan volumes from their optimal levels. Rationing overcomes a fundamental problem in NFPs; it allows them to distribute the surplus without distorting the volume of activity from the efficient level.

Cross-national studies of the linkage of health-care spending with population health have found surprisingly limited evidence of benefits. In this study, we investigated associations between national health spending and key health resources (numbers of hospital beds, physicians, and nurses) and utilization of cost-effective health services (antenatal care, attendance of trained staff at childbirth, and measles vaccination), sometimes in ways that curtail the benefits of that expenditure. Using annual panel data from 1990–2014 covering 140 countries, we show that variation in health spending as a share of gross domestic product is not associated with decreased mortality rates. It is also very weakly associated with increased health-care resources and health service utilization (elasticity smaller than 0.08), with the association being close to 0 in low-income countries. In addition, countries with a higher share of out-of-pocket spending have a significantly lower level of health resources and service utilization. These findings, rather than the ineffectiveness of health care, could explain the lack of impact of health spending. In contrast, gross domestic product per capita is significantly associated with increased health resources, a higher rate of service utilization, and lower mortality rates, suggesting that income is an important determinant of public health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rationality's degree is measured by means of an arbitrary continuous function that is normalized so that zero corresponds to full rationality. Its advantage is that it captures many common approaches to modeling bounded rationality, which allows us to study the impact of introducing bounded rationality without having to specify the precise rationality measure under consideration.

In this systematic review, we gather evidence on community financing schemes and insurance programs for family planning in developing countries, and we assess the impact of these programs on primary outcomes related to contraceptive use. To identify and evaluate the research findings, we adopt a four-stage review process that employs a weight-of-evidence and risk-of-bias analytic approach. Out of 19,138 references that were identified, only four studies were included in our final analysis, and only one study was determined to be of high quality. In the four studies, the evidence on the impact of community-based financing on family planning and fertility outcomes is inconclusive. These limited and mixed findings suggest that either: 1) more high-quality evidence on community-based financing for family planning is needed before any conclusions can be made; or 2) community-based financing for family planning may, in fact, have little or no effect on family planning outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In real business cycle models with spot markets, agents respond optimally to fluctuations by varying their labour supply. While this is individually optimal, the employment volatility that results is inefficient; the inefficiency is due to the lack of forward markets for labour and the consequent inability of the young to insure against future shocks. A real business cycle model is constructed in which an active monetary policy, accommodating past price shocks to prevent the expectation of price reversion, Pareto-dominates a stable money stock by stabilizing employment over the cycle. Stable employment approximates the outcome with complete insurance markets; the young would like to sell a fixed volume of labour forward, allowing less risk-averse agents to bear the volatility in the spot labour market. These results undermine the use of the 'full information' competitive equilibrium as a benchmark for policy analysis in spot market models.

Objectives This paper aimed to estimate the effect of tobacco taxes on total mortality and cause-specific mortality in the 50 States plus the District of Columbia, USA, over the period 1970-2005 as well as the net effect on deaths averted in 2010. Methods We used a fixed effects panel regression to measure the impact of changes in total tobacco taxes on total and cause-specific mortality rates over the period 1970-2005, using a 5-year lag structure between changes in tobacco taxes and mortality rates. The estimates were used to determine the number of deaths averted in the year 2010 by tobacco tax increases over the period 1970-2005. Results Descriptive results showed that nominal total tobacco tax increased from US$0.18 in 1970 to US $1.24 in 2005, which after adjusting to 2005 US$, corresponds to an increase in real total tobacco tax from US$ 0.89 in 1970 to US$ 1.24 in 2005. We found that increases in total tobacco tax were beneficial, with a $1 increase in total tobacco tax decreasing overall mortality rate by 8.0%. Based on these results, we estimated a net saving of 53 300 lives in 2010 due to the tobacco tax changes over the period 1970-2005. Conclusions Our results demonstrate that higher tobacco taxes lead to lower total mortality rates and avoided deaths. Strong tobacco tax policies are essential to improving overall population health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A review of the article "Disease and Development: The Effect of Life Expectancy on Economic Growth," by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, which appeared in the 2007 issue is presented.

We examine the joint distribution of levels of income per capita, life expectancy, and years of schooling across countries in 1960 and in 2000. In 1960 countries were clustered in two groups; a rich, highly educated, high longevity “developed” group and a poor, less educated, high mortality, “underdeveloped” group. By 2000 however we see the emergence of three groups; one underdeveloped group remaining near 1960 levels, a developed group with higher levels of education, income, and health than in 1960, and an intermediate group lying between these two. This finding is consistent with both the ideas of a new “middle income trap” that countries face even if they escape the “low income trap”, as well as the notion that countries which escaped the poverty trap form a temporary “transition regime” along their path to the “developed” group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on the economic impacts of family planning and reproductive health. It is mentioned that family planning has positive impacts on women's earnings, body-mass indexes of both women and children and children's schooling. It is also discussed that decreased fertility improved economic growth as more women could participate in paid labor and there was low dependency on youth.