François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights, Harvard School of Public Health, Harvard University, Boston, MA 02115, USA.
Proc Biol Sci. 2010 Apr 22;277(1685):1185-92. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2009.1778. Epub 2009 Dec 9.
While most of the world has enjoyed exponential economic growth, more than one-sixth of the world is today roughly as poor as their ancestors were many generations ago. Widely accepted general explanations for the persistence of such poverty have been elusive and are needed by the international development community. Building on a well-established model of human infectious diseases, we show how formally integrating simple economic and disease ecology models can naturally give rise to poverty traps, where initial economic and epidemiological conditions determine the long-term trajectory of the health and economic development of a society. This poverty trap may therefore be broken by improving health conditions of the population. More generally, we demonstrate that simple human ecological models can help explain broad patterns of modern economic organization.
虽然世界上大多数地区都经历了经济的指数级增长，但仍有六分之一以上的人口的生活水平与他们的祖先在多代以前基本相同。国际发展界一直难以找到普遍接受的、能够解释贫困现象长期存在的原因。我们在一个成熟的人类传染病模型基础上进行研究，结果表明，通过将简单的经济和疾病生态学模型进行有机整合，可以自然而然地形成贫困陷阱，即初始的经济和流行病学条件决定了一个社会的健康和经济发展的长期轨迹。因此，改善人口健康状况可以打破这种贫困陷阱。更普遍地说，我们的研究表明，简单的人类生态模型可以帮助解释现代经济组织的广泛模式。
