Compared to their rich counterparts, poor nations bear a disproportionately heavier disease burden, partly because being in the tropics, they are subject to a cocktail of factors that make their poor citizens vulnerable even to preventable and curable diseases like malaria and pneumonia.
Michael Kremer, this year's joint winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics traces the disease burden in poor countries to a wide range of factors, not least being accidents of geography, lack of sufficient resources to provide adequate health services, and, of course, dysfunctional governments.
