Health, Education, and Economic Development

发达国家的研究人员早就知道健康、教育和劳动力市场结果之间的联系。最近，人们也日益认识到健康，特别是热带疾病，可能在不发达国家持续贫穷方面发挥的重要作用。然而，由于缺乏调查这种关系的适当数据，在理清健康、教育和收入之间的因果关系方面存在困难，因此研究进展缓慢。本研究依靠可靠的方法和原始数据收集来解决这些问题，通过三个相互关联的项目。第一个项目考察了以学校为基础的卫生项目在肯尼亚农村的长期影响。从1998年开始，为肠道蠕虫（蠕虫）提供免费医疗。肠道蠕虫感染了该地区90%以上的小学生。1998-2001年期间，随机“分阶段”向学校提供医疗，这种前瞻性项目设计有助于克服确定健康收益与后来结果之间因果关系方向的问题。该研究建立在现有的这些学龄儿童教育和健康结果数据库的基础上，所得数据集将包含十年来独特的纵向教育、劳动力市场、人口统计和健康信息。如果从驱虫行动中获得的儿童健康收益与成人贫困之间存在密切联系，其结果可能证明增加对儿童健康和营养项目的公共投资是合理的。第二个项目还使用前瞻性研究设计考察了儿童健康与教育之间的联系，但在印度德里的城市贫民窟进行。本研究评估了一个项目的影响，该项目通过现有的学前网络向2-6岁的儿童提供铁补充剂和驱虫药物。第三个项目侧重于个人如何学习新的卫生技术并作出采用决定的相关但又不同的问题，在这个案例中是肯尼亚的驱虫药物。本文采用了一种新的实验方法来估计药物使用中的“同伴效应”，并使用一种新的社会学习模型来解释实证结果。这项研究将大大有助于我们了解欠发达国家健康与教育和劳动力市场结果之间的因果关系。

Researchers in developed countries have long known of the link between health and education and labor market outcomes. There has also recently been a growing awareness of the important role that health, and in particular tropical disease, may play in perpetuating poverty in less developed countries. However, research progress has been slowed by difficulties in disentangling the causal relationships between health, education, and income partly because of lack of suitable data to investigate the relationship. This research relies on credible methods and original data collection to address these issues, through three inter-related projects.The first project examines the long-run impact of a school-based health program in rural Kenya. Free medical treatment for intestinal helminthes (worms) was provided starting in 1998. Intestinal worms infect over 90 percent of primary school children in this area. Medical treatment was randomly "phased in" to the schools during 1998-2001, and this prospective project design helps overcome the problem of establishing the direction of causality between health gains and later outcomes. The research builds on an existing database of educational and health outcomes for these school children, and the resulting dataset will contain unique longitudinal educational, labor market, demographic, and health information over ten years. If there are strong links between child health gains from de-worming and adult poverty, the results may justify increased public investments in child health and nutrition programs.The second project also examines the link between child health and education using a prospective research design, but in the urban slums of Delhi, India. This study evaluates the impact of a project, which delivered Iron supplementation and de-worming drugs to 2-6 year old children through an existing pre-school network. The third project focuses on the related, but distinct, issue of how individuals learn about new health technologies, and make adoption decisions, in this case for de-worming drugs in Kenya. A novel experimental methodology is used to estimate "peer effects" in drug adoption, and we interpret the empirical results using a new model of social learning. This research will greatly contribute to our understanding of the causal link between health and educational and labor market outcomes in Less Developed Countries.