Abstract
Understanding why some human populations remain persistently poor remains a significant challenge for both the social and natural sciences. The extremely poor are generally reliant on their immediate natural resource base for subsistence and suffer high rates of mortality due to parasitic and infectious diseases. Economists have developed a range of models to explain persistent poverty, often characterized as poverty traps, but these rarely account for complex biophysical processes. In this Essay, we argue that by coupling insights from ecology and economics, we can begin to model and understand the complex dynamics that underlie the generation and maintenance of poverty traps, which can then be used to inform analyses and possible intervention policies. To illustrate the utility of this approach, we present a simple coupled model of infectious diseases and economic growth, where poverty traps emerge from nonlinear relationships determined by the number of pathogens in the system. These nonlinearities are comparable to those often incorporated into poverty trap models in the economics literature, but, importantly, here the mechanism is anchored in core ecological principles. Coupled models of this sort could be usefully developed in many economically important biophysical systems--such as agriculture, fisheries, nutrition, and land use change--to serve as foundations for deeper explorations of how fundamental ecological processes influence structural poverty and economic development.
Highlights
In his landmark treatise, An Essay on the Principle of Population [1], Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus argued that population growth will necessarily exceed the growth rate of the means of subsistence, making poverty inevitable.The system of feedbacks that Malthus posited creates a situation similar to what social scientists term a ‘‘poverty trap’’: i.e., a self-reinforcing mechanism that causes poverty to persist [2,3]
The model that we develop here focuses on human infectious diseases for the following reasons: (i) models of infectious diseases are contributing to major advances in ecological theory in general, with lessons that are applied to similar dynamic living systems such as fisheries, wildlife, and food production; (ii) infectious diseases are the leading killers of the poor and have been dominant natural enemies of humans throughout history [26,27,28]; and (iii) there is an emerging theoretical ecology literature that explicitly models the role of infectious diseases on poverty traps [29,30,31,32]
As in the economic growth model, for clarity we focus on the simplest version of the system, a schematic of which is presented in Figure 1b and illustrated graphically in Figure 1d
Summary
“Poverty, Disease, and the Ecology of Complex Systems.”.
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