Nurturing Progress: The Role of Nutrition and Disease for the Take-off to Modern Growth

• Applicants: Professor Martin Karlsson, Ph.D.; Professor Dr. Holger Strulik
• Subject Area: Economic Policy, Applied Economics ; Economic and Social History ; Economic Theory
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 570966972

This project investigates how health, demographic, and economic factors interacted in the transition from stagnation to modern growth, with a focus on disease, physiological development, fertility, education, and technology. The goal is to develop a general conceptual framework to explain these transitions, offering insights applicable across diverse historical and regional contexts. Central to the project is the integration of Unified Growth Theory (UGT) with Robert Fogel’s concept of technophysio evolution, which links improvements in physiological development to long-run economic progress. A dynamic general equilibrium model of overlapping generations will be developed to explore how disease environments, agricultural productivity, and human physiology influence fertility and educational investments, ultimately driving the shift from stagnation to sustained growth. The project bridges two gaps in existing research. First, it connects two strands of literature that have evolved largely in isolation: one on how disease environments affect mortality and fertility, the other on how nutrition and physiology influence health, productivity, and growth. These perspectives have rarely been integrated within a common analysis framework. Second, it forges a closer dialogue between structural and reduced-form approaches by designing a research strategy in which theoretical and empirical components are mutually reinforcing. Historical data from Sweden provides an ideal empirical setting. Long-term records on fertility, mortality, height, disease exposure, education, and economic conditions will be integrated into a unified regional panel dataset. The empirical work begins with extensive descriptive and causal analyses, exploiting exogenous variation from natural experiments such as vaccination campaigns and weather shocks. These analyses will identify key mechanisms and estimate the causal impact of health and nutrition shocks on fertility and human capital formation. These findings will guide the development of a dynamic model that captures variation in regional transition paths. The model will formally analyze how differences in disease environments, nutrition, and agricultural productivity shape incentives for fertility control and educational investment, explaining why some regions transitioned earlier than others. It will also support counterfactual simulations to assess how alternative historical scenarios might have altered development trajectories. By combining empirical analysis with theoretical modeling, this project offers a unified account of how improvements in health and human physiology—interacting with technology and education—drove the transition to modern growth. The findings will contribute to debates in economic history, development economics, and demography, and offer a framework for analyzing transitions in health and development, past and present.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: USA
• Cooperation Partner: Professorin Dr. Dora Costa