Health and Economic Productivity in Rural Paraguay

University Of New Mexico, Albuquerque NM

Investigators

Abstract

Hurtado, Hill Throughout South America, indigenous communities are less economically prosperous and more vulnerable to infectious diseases than are neighboring rural peasant non-indigenous communities. Little is known about the extent to which economic prosperity is affected by the health status of adults in diverse rural communities. This project will study the relationship between health and economic productivity. In association with a public health project funded by NIH, the NSF project will do preliminary work to prepare for a major project to test hypotheses derived from a causal path model with adult health status as the predictor variable, economic productivity and various aspects of economic decision making as intermediate variables, and the well-being of household members as the outcome variable; examine and control for the effects of ethnicity on causal variables in the model; determine to what extent variation in health status across communities accounts for differences in economic prosperity in the communities in the Mbaracayu Reserve in eastern Paraguay.