Angus Deaton

"Disease has traveled with goods and people since the earliest times. Armed globalization spread disease, to the extent of eliminating entire populations. The geography of disease shaped patterns of colonization and industrialization throughout the now poor world. Many see related threats to public health from current globalization. Multilateral and bilateral trade agreements do not always adequately represent the interests of poor countries, the General Agreement on Trade in Services may restrict the freedom of signatories to shape their own health delivery systems, and it remains unclear whether current arrangements for intellectual property rights are in the interests of citizens of poor countries with HIV/AIDS. However, to the extent that globalization promotes economic growth, population health may benefit, and there has been substantial reductions in poverty and in international inequalities in life-expectancy over the last 50 years. Although there is a strong inverse relationship between the poverty and life-expectancy in levels, gains in life expectancy have been only weakly correlated with growth rates and, in the last decade, the HIV/AIDS epidemic has widened international inequalities in life expectancy. The rapid transmission of health knowledge and therapies from one rich country to another has led to a swift convergence of adult mortality rates among the rich of the world, particularly men. Globalization would do much for global health if transmission from rich to poor countries could be accelerated"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site.

Using data from several countries, including Cote d'Ivoire, India, Pakistan, Taiwan, and Thailand, this book analyzes household survey data from developing countries and illustrates how such data can be used to cast light on a range of short-term and long-term policy issues.

This book provides an overview of recent research on saving and consumption, a field in which substantial progress has been made over the last decade. Attempts by economists to understand saving and consumption patterns have generated some of the best science in economics. For more than fifty years, there has been serious empirical and theoretical activity--never separating data, theory, and policy as has happened in many branches of economics. Research has drawn microeconomists interested in household behavior, as well as macroeconomists, for whom the behavior of aggregate consumption has always occupied a central role in explaining aggregate fluctuations. Econometricians have also made distinguished contributions, and there has been a steady flow of new methodologies by those working on saving and consumption, in time-series econometrics, as well as in the study of micro and panel data. A coherent account of these developments is presented here, emphasizing the interplay between micro and the macro, between studies of cross-section and panels, and those using aggregate time series data. --back cover

This paper is concerned with two related questions, first, what determines coffee and cocoa yields, and second, how should the government determine the farmgate prices for the two crops. Section 1 of the paper is a preliminary analysis of the agricultural data from the Living Standard Survey. Section 2 looks at cocoa and coffee yields and their determinants. It examines the age/yield relationships and the apparent effects of fertilizer and pesticide use on yields. ALso examined are a range of other factors that might play a role in determining yields, for example, prices of other crops, wage rates, household size, and educational levels. Section 3 turns to distributional issues involved in the pricing of cocoa and coffee. Typical budgets for farmers are presented, and their position in the income and consumption distribution descibed. Section 4 concerns itself with the analysis of policy change, and speculates on what might be the effects of moving towards the policy of allowing domestic prices to be determined by world prices. Finally, section 5 summarizes the major policy conclusions and outlines areas where further research is likely to be useful in improving policy advice.