On page 1391 of the "Colonial Origins of Development", Acemoglu asserts that the prevalent outbreak of Malaria should have insignificant direct effect on a nation's economic performance since many natives would naturally develop immunity. However, I think his argument may be overly simplistic and therefore want to provide a brief criticism on this blog post.
I have read Sach's paper on Malaria that Acemoglu criticizes in this article. Basically, Sach believes that Malaria hinders economic growth precisely because the disease discourages investment in human capital, particularly among children . Since new born infants are yet to develop immunity against Malaria (and Acemoglu also acknowledges this), the child mortality rate remains quite high in tropical/sub-tropical regions where the outbreak is frequent. What is interesting is that the birth rate in these areas is also very high. The reason for this phenomenon is that families living in Malaria infected regions want to ensure that they have a desirable number of 'surviving' children. While this decision at household level seems rational, large number of children per family increases the 'dependency burden', which in turn slows down the macroeconomy. With limited (financial) resources, each household is constraint to provide quality education for all the children, thus reducing the investment in human capital (and we all know what happens to a country with little capital).
Although this is a minor criticism on Acemoglu's research, I just wanted to point out that he cannot discredit Sach solely on the basis of adult immunity.
No comments:
Post a Comment