A Review of Disease and Development

Abstract

Acemoglu and Johnson (2007) put forward the unprecedented view that health improvement has no significant effect on income growth. To arrive at this conclusion, they constructed predicted mortality as an instrumental variable based on the WHO international disease interventions to analyse this problem. I replicate the process of their research and eliminate some biases in their estimate. In addition, and more importantly, we argue that the construction of their instrumental variable contains a violation of the exclusion restriction of their instrumental variable. This negative correlation between health improvement and income growth still lacks an accurate causal explanation, according to which the instrumental variable they constructed increases reverse causality bias instead of eliminating it.