The development of nations conditions the disease space

Antonios Garas, Sophie Guthmuller () and Athanasios Lapatinas

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Using the economic complexity methodology on data for disease prevalence in 195 countries during the period of 1990-2016, we propose two new metrics for quantifying the relatedness between diseases, or the ‘disease space’ of countries. With these metrics, we analyze the geography of diseases and empirically investigate the effect of economic development on the health complexity of countries. We show that a higher income per capita increases the complexity of countries’ diseases. Furthermore, we build a disease-level index that links a disease to the average level of GDP per capita of the countries that have prevalent cases of the disease. With this index, we highlight the link between economic development and the complexity of diseases and illustrate, at the disease-level, how increases in income per capita are associated with more complex diseases.

Keywords: health complexity; disease complexity; economic development (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C1 I1 I15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-03-18
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/92831/1/MPRA_paper_92831.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The development of nations conditions the disease space (2021)
Working Paper: The development of nations conditions the disease space (2019)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:92831

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().