Health and Development: A Circular Causality
Résumé
Historically population health improvements and economic development are closely interrelated. The theme “Health and Development” poses indeed a large number of both theoretical and empirical questions, and social policy issues in this area are obvious. The issue of bidirectional causality between health and development has contributed to one of the most lively debates in the last two decades in development economics, with an alternation of mainstreams rather than a real dialogue. We offer four pathways to overcome these limitations, some of which are not new but have not been integrated together: (i) reconcile the microeconomic and macroeconomic analyses, (ii) explore the channels of influence to better resolve the ambiguity of the relationship, (iii) establish a dialogue with the epidemiology and biomedical sciences – the definition of a good or bad health is not neutral in this debate, neither are the health indicators used, (iv) develop a supply side analysis, while so far the demand side has received more attention.