Principal Investigator Gabriella Carolini
This research seeks to understand how shifts in public subsidies correlate with different public health challenges. My hypothesis tests whether and how subsidies impact the elasticity demands for basic services among income-poor communities, and thus alter the quality of basic services used in times of heightened resource scarcity. Decreased use of better basic services might make populations more vulnerable to communicable diseases, as well as increase spread of communicable diseases. By examining lagged effects of subsidy policy shifts and correlating this with other micro and macro-level data, including the number cases of malaria, cholera, and dengue fever in countries in South America, Central America, and Sub-Saharan Africa, we can begin to explore whether correlations are in evidence.