Gyrations in African Mortality and their Effect on Economic Growth.

I examine recent changes in African mortality and discuss their potential economic and demographic effects. Growth in life expectancy sharply departed from its trend after 1990, and then experienced a sharp acceleration after 2005. This latter acceleration was due overwhelmingly to improvements in HIV and malaria. Economists differ in their estimates of how large the structural effect of health on income is, with many estimates being relatively small. Taking seriously the delays built into many plausible causal channels would lead one to expect that any economic effects of these mortality changes, if they are detectable at all, will not appear for several decades. By contrast, the effect of declining mortality, especially from malaria, should soon be visible in data on population age structure in some countries.