Economics professor, Erick Gong, gave the first talk of our Spring Speaker Series entitled, “The Economics of Global Health.” Prof. Gong began with a discussion of how we can think about global health issues using economics, then explained his own research regarding transactional sex and HIV/AIDS, and ended with suggestions for students interested in pursuing global health through an economic perspective.
Prof. Gong helped us define global health and noted its relationship to discrepancies in health outcomes between high and low income countries. He observed that there are technologies that can dramatically reduce the risk of disease, such as chlorine or filters to prevent diarrhea, condoms to help prevent HIV/AIDS and insecticide treated nets to prevent malaria. Economics can be used to try to understand the constraints that prevent people from using these technologies, especially in low income countries.
Sub-Saharan Africa bears a disproportionate burden of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Though there are several possible reasons for the high prevalence in this area, Prof. Gong hypothesizes that multiple concurrent partnerships may play a substantial role in the transmission of the disease in Sub-Saharan Africa. His research examines the notion that income shocks lead to increases in transactional sex, which leads to higher rates of HIV infection. The data, taken from weather reports and demographic and health surveys among men and women in the agricultural and non-agricultural sectors in Kenya, suggests that negative income shocks lead to increased risk of HIV infection. The response of transactional sex to income shocks may be due to lack of access to savings, insurance or other social safety nets, and Prof. Gong suggests providing access might reduce this response.
For a more detailed write-up of Professor Gong’s talk, see these notes: globemed2013_gongtalk