How Important is Innovation for Better Development Outcomes?

How Important is Innovation for Better Development Outcomes?

Looking beyond income growth: the example of child mortality

While the development community has spent decades searching, with limited success, for reliable models of economic growth, however, advances in technology have been quietly increasing these other quality of life measures. Determining Estimates for Non-income Factors Related to Mortality Reductions

This chart decomposes the child mortality reductions of a country between the two time periods into that resulting from higher income and that due to curve shifts. GDP per Capita vs Child Mortality Rates in 1900 and 2016, Select Countries

Using this methodology, the reduction in mortality that are due to income and shift effects for these countries are:

 

% of improvement due to technology

% of improvement due to technology effect varies by income level—it is generally smaller for rich countries and it can even become negative.

Source: www.cgdev.org