Poverty trap formed by the ecology of infectious diseases

Abstract

While most of the world has enjoyed exponential economic growth, more than one-sixth of the world is today roughly as poor as their ancestors were many generations ago. Widely accepted general explanations for the persistence of such poverty have been elusive and are needed by the international development community. Building on a well-established model of human infectious diseases, we show how formally integrating simple economic and disease ecology models can naturally give rise to poverty traps, where initial economic and epidemiological conditions determine the long-term trajectory of the health and economic development of a society. This poverty trap may therefore be broken by improving health conditions of the population. More generally, we demonstrate that simple human ecological models can help explain broad patterns of modern economic organization.

Provisioning of Public Health Can Be Designed to Anticipate Public Policy Responses

“…Sound models combining empirical evidence with systems analyses will help free us from over-simplistic paradigms and provide clearer pictures of the limitations and the opportunities in policy selection. In particular, this approach may help resolve the potential role of health in poverty-traps and economic mobility [4].…”

Economic inequality caused by feedbacks between poverty and the dynamics of a rare tropical disease: the case of Buruli ulcer in sub-Saharan Africa

“…R. Soc. B 282: 20151426 diseases and economics, showing that populations with high prevalence of diseases and low economic resources can theoretically be trapped in a 'vicious cycle' of long-term poverty and high disease burdens [12][13][14]. While such models may apply to diseases like malaria, hookworm or schistosomiasis, they do not provide insights on the impact of diseases with low prevalence but great disability burden.…”

“…Our modelling framework is based on coupled systems of human disease and economic growth, and stems from a recent body of theory on feedbacks between poverty and disease [12][13][14]. We adopt an individual-based approach to better capture withinpopulation heterogeneities of BU disease, notably issues such as incubation period, individual delay in seeking medical treatment or treatment duration.…”

The Burden of Livestock Parasites on the Poor

“…The system described by Figure 1 can be explicitly modeled by coupling existing models of disease, livestock, and economic dynamics, variations of which have been presented elsewhere [11,12]. For heuristic purposes, Figure 2 presents the results of a stylized version of this system where both zoonotic and nonzoonotic livestock diseases are shown to influence human disease prevalence and income.…”