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Introduction to Modern Economic Growth There are a number of reasons for questioning this second, and more widely-held view, of geographic determinism as well Most of the technological differences emphasized by these authors refer to agriculture But as we have seen in Chapter and will encounter again below, the origins of differential economic growth across countries goes back to the age of industrialization Modern economic growth came with industry, and it is the countries that have failed to industrialize that are poor today Low agricultural productivity, if anything, should create a comparative advantage in industry, and thus encourage those countries with the “unfavorable geography” to start investing in industry before others One might argue that reaching a certain level of agricultural productivity is a prerequisite for industrialization While this is plausible (at least possible), we will see below that many of the societies that have failed to industrialize had already achieved a certain level of agricultural productivity, and in fact were often ahead of those who later industrialized very rapidly Thus a simple link between unfavorable agricultural conditions and the failure to take off seems to be absent.3 The third variant of the geography hypothesis, which has become particularly popular over the past decade, links poverty in many areas of the world to their “disease burden,” emphasizing that: “The burden of infectious disease is higher in the tropics than in the temperate zones” (Sachs, 2000, p 32) Bloom and Sachs (1998) and Gallup and Sachs (2001, p 91) claim that the prevalence of malaria alone reduces the annual growth rate of sub-Saharan African economies by as much as 2.6 percent a year Such a magnitude implies that had malaria been eradicated in 1950, income per capita in sub-Saharan Africa would be double of what it is today If we add to this the effect of other diseases, we would obtain even larger effects (perhaps implausibly large effects) The World Health Organization also subscribes to this view and in its recent report writes: “ in today’s world, poor health has particularly pernicious effects on economic development in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and pockets of high disease and intense poverty elsewhere ” (p 24) and 3Ex post, one can in fact tell the opposite story: perhaps poor nations of today had agriculturally superior land, and this created a comparative advantage against industry and they failed to benefit from the increasing returns to scale in manufacturing 170