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Rodrigo R. Soares University of Maryland, Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, NBER and IZA

Comment on Robert Fogel’s “Health, Human Capital & Economic Growth” IADB Workshop on Health, Human Development Potential and the Quality of Life – April 26 2006 – Washington DC. Rodrigo R. Soares University of Maryland, Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, NBER and IZA. Main Points.

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Rodrigo R. Soares University of Maryland, Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, NBER and IZA

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  1. Comment on Robert Fogel’s “Health, Human Capital & Economic Growth”IADB Workshop on Health, Human Development Potential and the Quality of Life – April 26 2006 – Washington DC Rodrigo R. Soares University of Maryland, Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, NBER and IZA

  2. Main Points • Nutrition as a source of growth. • Physiological and technological changes interacting to generate a transformation of the human species  technophysio evolution. • Physical differences across people in different areas of the world seem to reflect much more socioeconomic conditions than genetics/race. • This process would explain 30% of the growth in income per capita in the UK over the last 200 years.

  3. Implications • 1/3 of most of the growth experienced by the UK would have been determined from changes in nutrition and its consequences  300%.

  4. Some Points • Several important changes were taking place at the same time. • How much of the change in nutrition was endogenous to this broader process and how much was a driving force? • Initial improvements in nutrition and population expansion without a countervailing Malthusian mechanism: some technological change necessary.

  5. Some Other Points • Has this mechanism become less important over the 20th century? • Factors associated with nutrition explain 90% of decline in French mortality between 1785 and 1870, but only 50% during the past century. • Changes in health have become increasingly dissociate from income and nutrition, but have remained intimately linked to the behavior of other demographic variables. • How important is this mechanism nowadays to explain the experience of countries that have already gone through the demographic transition?

  6. Open Questions • In the developed world: what do obesity trends mean from this perspective? • In developing countries: have the reductions in mortality been too fast to be explained by technophysio evolution?

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