POVERTY, INEQUALITY AND HEALTH IN ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

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We propose to collect data on individuals' health and economic status in a series of household surveys in India (where a third of the world's poor live) and in South Africa (which is experiencing simultaneous economic, social, and epidemiological transitions). The surveys will be both methodological (developing new questionnaires, e.g. to improve morbidity measures, to link social standing and inequality, to measure happiness and dignity) and substantive (collecting sufficient data for meaningful analysis). The questionnaires will collect a wide range of consumption and income information, in addition to self-reported, anthropometric, and clinical measures of physical, mental, and social health, and the analysis of the data will explore a range of links between money and health. The surveys will cover people of all ages, but will have a non-exclusive focus on the elderly; the effects of pensions in both India and South Africa, and of child grants in South Africa are of great interest. The proposal also covers secondary data analysis in both countries, and internationally, as well as the linking of the new data with previous information, e.g. from censuses and national sample surveys. An important line of proposed research is the construction of a time-series of cross- sections for the 80 regions of India on linked consumption, income, education, and health measures from the (only recently available) National Sample Surveys, a mine of data, including education, aging, and health, that has been previously little used. We also propose theoretical and empirical work on the effects of differences in life-expectancy on saving, both within and across countries.