Grantee: Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA
Researcher: Matthew Bonds, Ph.D.
Grant Title: Poverty Traps and the Ecology of Economic Development
https://doi.org/10.37717/220020322
Program Area: Studying Complex Systems
Grant Type: Scholar Award
Amount: $450,000
Year Awarded: 2012
Duration: 6 years
Understanding the underlying causes of the persistence of extreme poverty continues to elude academic economists, policy-makers, and the international development community. Canonical models of economic growth were developed, first, to explain the behavior of industrialized economies, and were subsequently applied as general frameworks for understanding economic growth throughout the world. However, poor economies do not only have fewer resources than wealthy countries, they are organized in fundamentally different ways, and behave according to different processes. These fundamental differences are inherently ecological.
The dominant economic activity of the poor in most of Africa is subsistence agricultural. The fundamental basis of "human capital" is physical biological growth and development, determined by a combination of positive influences in the form of nutrition and negative influences in the form of disease. The underlying drivers of these systems is therefore a complex relationships between the biophysical inputs into agriculture and the ecology of infectious diseases. My current research agenda focuses on building coupled models of economic-epidemiological systems, and exploring the ways that health conditions can influence poverty traps. I propose to build a small team of mathematicians and computer analysts to develop new models of coupled disease-economic systems that have the appropriate level realism to be ultimately parameterized with field data. These models will be tested from field data in Rwanda.