Disease and Development: A Reply to Bloom, Canning, and Fink

Abstract

Beginning in the 1940s, a wave of health innovations and more effective international public health measures led to a rapid and large improvement in health; for example, in some relatively poor countries, life expectancy at birth quickly rose from around 40 years to over 60 years. In Acemoglu and Johnson (2006, 2007), we constructed an instrument for these changes in life expectancy: “predicted mortality,” which is calculated from initial mortality by disease and the timing of global disease interventions. Across a wide range of specifications, our work suggests no positive effects—over 40- or 60-year horizons—of life expectancy on GDP per capita (or GDP per working-age population).