Don’t Get Sick in an LDC
This is a heads up from Tyler Cowen.
Three years of medical school in Tanzania results in only a 1 percentage point increase in the probability of a correct diagnosis. In Paraguay, the amount of time a doctor spends with a patient has nothing to do with the severity of the patient's illness.
This is from "The Quality of Medical Advice in Low-Income Countries," by Jishnu Das, Jeffrey Hammer, and Kenneth Leonard, in the Spring 2008 issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives.
Are people poor because they are sick? Or are they sick because they are poor?
Hat tip to Jason Shafrin: Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo find that for rural households, the probability that the mother is alive is 36 percentage points higher if the family has a daily per capita expenditures (DPCE) of $6 to $10 versus a DCPE of $1 to $2. Using a panel data set specification, the authors also find that adults over 50 living on less than $2 a day are at least three times as likely to die over the next five to seven years than those living on $6 to $10 a day.