Editorial: Poverty into Wealth

Wealth, Poverty, and Happiness

Editorial: Iatrogenic poverty

Poverty and illness are intertwined. It is a well-documented fact that poverty leads to ill-health. In every society, morbidity and mortality are higher among the poor (Wagstaff 2002). Determinants of lower health status include nutrition, environment, education, lifestyle and access to health care. Less is known about how illness itself can lead to poverty in developing countries. There are tw...

Is poverty or wealth driving HIV transmission?

Evidence of associations between socioeconomic status and the spread of HIV in different settings and at various stages of the epidemic is still rudimentary. Few existing studies are able to track incidence and to control effectively for potentially confounding factors. This paper reviews the findings of recent studies, including several included in this volume, in an attempt to uncover the deg...

Poverty Traps, Indeterminacy, and the Wealth Distribution

In the present paper we consider a one-sector growth model in continuous time with a production externality and endogenous labor supply. There is a continuum of households who have identical preferences but differ with respect to their initial wealth. We show that there exist economies such that an indeterminate steady state exists for some wealth distribution but not for others. A second resul...

The geography of poverty and wealth.

Why are some countries stupendously rich and others horrendously poor? Social theorists have been captivated by this question since the late 18th century, when Scottish economist Adam Smith addressed the issue in his magisterial work The Wealth of Nations. Smith argued that the best prescription for prosperity is a free-market economy in which the government allows businesses substantial freedo...