The Economics of Morbidity, Mortality, and Fertility
Full Review

Reviewed by: Aniceto C. Orbeta Jr., Senior Research Fellow, Philippine Institute For Development Studies, Visiting Researcher ADBI
Review posted 30 June 2006
Review No. 80

CD-ROM Information

Content: The CD-ROM is a lecture-based multimedia CD-ROM course. It presents 15 lectures in an audio format with accompanying slide presentations. Coupled with reading lists, it takes a step-by-step, graduate-level approach to covering the field of population economics. Exercises and solutions at the end of certain lectures indicate its potential to be used either as an individual or group learning tool.
Publication Date: 1 June 2003
Audience: The CD-ROM is targeted at public health analysts, advocates, and researchers in developing countries seeking to understand how economic concepts can be applied to morbidity, mortality, and fertility issues, and their role in development.
Producer: Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health (JHU)
Size: 490MB
Price: Free
Manual needed: No
How to order:

Order online.*

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Full Review

Content

The CD-ROM contains 15 lectures on a well-selected range of topics. The lectures are very thorough covering developments in the topics from early ideas to present rendition and empirical evidence. The lectures are structured as a university course and are, in fact, lectures given in the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, USA. The CD-ROM comes with a course syllabus describing the objectives of the course, topics to be covered, and corresponding reading materials. Though the readings are likely to be useful for users wanting to know the details of materials discussed in the lecture, they are not available on the CD-ROM. Many of them are in journals and publications that may not be accessible to people in developing countries. Most lectures include exercises with solutions provided. The exercises are rigorous and the equations in the solutions are explained well. However, the exercises do not cover all the materials in the lectures as one would find in a textbook. The CD-ROM also provides a glossary of technical terms arranged by lecture topic.

The lectures are presented in three formats:

• a combined audio and slide show;
• an audio-only presentation; and
• a slide show presentation.

RealPlayer, FlashPlayer, and Acrobat Reader are required to run this CD-ROM and are provided.

This is a brief overview of each lecture:

Lecture 1: "What is Economics" lays down the general objectives and themes of the lectures. It introduces basic economic concepts including values and constraints, individuals and societies, quality and quantity, the concept of modeling, descriptive and normative economics, population and national income, neoclassical model relating capital, labor, and technology.

Lecture 2 : "Population and Development in Macro Framework" provides  details of the aggregate relationship of population and the economy, and issues surrounding empirically estimating these relationships.

Lecture 3: "Microeconomics of Demand and Production" discusses the modeling of individual choice behavior. It deals with such economic tools as utility functions and budget constraints, deriving the concept of demand, and the concepts of substitution, income effects, and elasticity.

Lecture 4: "Economics of Health and Mortality" applies the economic frameworks introduced in earlier lectures to health and mortality problems. It briefly introduces commonly accepted frameworks and discusses specific issues of health demand as well as estimation problems and solutions.

Lecture 5: "Estimating Health Production Functions" continues the discussion in Lecture 4 with a special focus on health production functions. It presents modeling and estimation problems, and provides a detailed discussion of popular empirical estimates of health production functions.

Lecture 6: "Macro Models of Mortality". Trends in mortality transitions and the models developed to explain observed transitions are discussed in this lecture. It then continues with presenting and discussing empirical evidence on mortality transitions.

Lecture 7: "Health Transition and Producing the Optimal Health of a Nation" presents different indicators of health and health transitions, and how these are used in resource allocation decisions. It presents critiques on currently accepted methods of resource allocation.

Lecture 8: "Malthus Model". This lecture explores the elements of the Malthus Model on the role of population growth in development. In particular, it discusses how population growth affects wages and how this, in turn, affects the elements of population growth.

Lecture 9: "The Consequences of Morbidity and Mortality" discusses the economic effects of morbidity and mortality. The biology and economics of two diseases – schistosomiasis and malaria - are then discussed.. Finally, the role and value of medical insurance is reviewed.

Lecture 10: "Health Equity" investigates the nature and measures of equity problems in health. It then tackles how the health sector can address health inequity.

Lecture 11: "Starvation and Famine" explains the biology and economics of the extreme health problems of starvation and famines. Models for famine and starvation including chaos theory and speculative bubbles are outlined.

Lecture 12: "Economics of Fertility" discusses the economic theory of fertility including the cost of time models, quantity and quality tradeoff, and applications.

Lecture 13: "Models of Fertility" continues the discussion on the economic models of fertility. Multidisciplinary models that, in addition, consider the role of biology and preferences in child bearing are also discussed.

Lecture 14: "Family Planning" explores the models and perspectives on family planning and evaluating the outputs of family planning programs.

Lecture 15: "Linking Mortality, Fertility, Human Capital, and Development" presents the demographic transition and economic explanation why mortality and fertility decline with development and how these changes affect development. It also discusses economic models that explain these interrelationships. Finally, it discusses implications of household and community decisions.

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User-Friendliness and Navigability

The CD-ROM starts automatically on insertion. The CD-ROM uses a browser as the access software. The set of tabs on the left side of the home page is the main navigating tool. All of the contents of the CD-ROM are accessible through these tabs. A search facility would be useful for users to be able to jump to specific topics. Such a facility would no doubt save time for users wishing to only acquire specific information. For instance, the glossary could be improved with a search engine by providing links to the lectures where specific terms were covered. Users may also find it difficult to keep track of which lecture they reviewed last because there is no facility that indicates the completion of each lecture.

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Interactivity

The lectures are presented in audio format with accompanying slide shows. The exercises and corresponding solutions provided for most of the lectures are the main interactive features of this CD-ROM. The sound of the recordings is high quality. The lecturer speaks very clearly and quite slowly, making it easy for people with English as a second language to understand. The home page of the CD-ROM offers a link to e-mail the lecturer for comments on the content. Technical difficulties and questions can be addressed by contacting the developer of the CD-ROM with the link provided. 

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Distribution

The CD-ROM is available free from the School of Hygiene and Public Health, John Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, USA.

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Sustainability

Because the materials are so thoroughly covered and new results are not likely to overturn long accepted results of the field, this multimedia CD-ROM course will be useful to public health analysts, advocates, and researchers for a long time.

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