The Right Health Investments

Proper early nutrition can spectacularly change the entire life trajectory of a child. We know from long-term studies that it promotes brain development, making the child do better in school, and much better later in life, affecting everything from the happiness of marriages to the quality of jobs, and up to 60% more earnings.

The government has made significant progress in reducing child malnutrition, but with nearly half of all deaths of children aged under five mainly caused by poor diet, much still needs to be done. 

COPENHAGEN ― West Africa's Ebola epidemic has dominated headlines for much of the last year. But, as devastating as that outbreak has been, its death toll of less than 20,000 people is dwarfed by that of preventable diseases such as AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria, which together caused more than three million deaths in 2013, hitting the world's poorest people the hardest. This need not be the case; indeed, addressing these diseases would be an extraordinarily good investment.

Bjorn Lomborg writes in Mint with Bibek Debroy, the chairman of the Economic Advisory Council to the Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi. Together with Aditya Sinha they present a new research paper by Lomborg and Debroy. It argues for a number of amazing public policies for India, and they highlight four specific solutions that promise phenomenal benefits for every rupee spent: (1) Nutritional and health counseling, (2) family planning, (3) immunizations, and (4) agricultural R&D and certified seed production.