Last updated on October 4, 2011
You read that right: Eye disease and development. I was intrigued when I saw that it was the title of a new working paper (the link opens a .pdf document) on the NEP-DEV mailing list. After reading the abstract, the title made a lot more sense:
This research advances the hypothesis that cross-country variation in the historical incidence of eye disease has influenced the current global distribution of per capita income. The theory is that pervasive eye disease diminished the incentive to accumulate skills, thereby delaying the
fertility transition and the take-off to sustained economic growth. In order to estimate the influence from eye disease incidence empirically, we draw on an important fact from the field of epidemiology: Exposure to solar ultraviolet B radiation (UVB-R) is an underlying determinant of several forms of eye disease; the most important being cataract, which is currently the leading cause of blindness worldwide. Using a satellite-based measure of UVB-R, we document that societies more exposed to UVB-R are poorer and underwent the fertility transition with a significant delay compared to the forerunners. These findings are robust to the inclusion of an extensive set of climate and geography controls. Moreover, using a global data set on economic activity for all terrestrial grid cells we show that the link between UVB-R and economic development survives the inclusion of country fixed effect.
I have not had a chance to read the paper yet, but I wonder just how unpredictable UVB-R is within a given society, and so whether it is truly exogenous to economic growth. This is a compelling finding nevertheless.