The November 2025 CEPS Lecture Series is given by Luca Gori from the University of Pisa. Requirement: tba

Abstract: 

Infectious diseases have represented major causes of mortality and underdevelopment of human societies over mankind's history. Still today, communicable killers, such as malaria, tuberculosis and AIDS, are serious obstacles to the development of an entire sub-continent, namely Sub-Saharan Africa. Surprisingly, in the pre-COVID era, the interest of macroeconomists in the impact of communicable diseases on the long-term progress of human societies has been mostly occasional. We want to summarise some contributions on the interplay between communicable diseases and economic development, fuelled by the seminal works by Chakraborty et al.'s (2010, 2016), trying also to overtake some limitations of their approach. In particular, we critically discuss (i) a Unified Growth Theory model aiming to investigate the potential of HIV/AIDS to halt the fertility transition in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), (ii) the different perspectives of the two main approaches to intervention against communicable diseases in least-developed and developing settings, namely exogenous funding from international donors vs public health expenditures endogenous managed by the a­ icted countries, (iii) the general implications of public policies against infectious diseases.

Location:

ENS Paris-Saclay, Room 1B26
4 avenue des Sciences, 91190, Gif-sur-Yvette