Research Associate Alicia Menendez explores how health and income affect family survival.

Alicia Menendez, Harris School Research Associate, recently sat down to talk about her research in South Africa, fieldwork, and the impact she believes her work will have on the well-being of poor populations.

What is the basis of your project on health and income in South Africa?

Two colleagues and I are conducting a series of household surveys in three South African sites (two rural and one urban) to measure a range of indicators of well-being, from income and assets to health status and intra-household relationships. In some cases, we even have complete medical examinations of individuals. We want as complete a picture as possible in order to better understand the links between socioeconomic status and health status. While the correlation between the two has been well documented, how it works is more of a mystery. And we will be analyzing the ways in which the costs of illness and death affect other aspects of family life, such as investments in children, overall economic stability, and, ultimately, the household’s survival.

How do health and income impact each other?

Health affects income mostly through labor market outcomes such as the ability to work and earn wages. Income affects health through nutrition, risk behavior, and treatment compliance, among others. We know that health and socioeconomic status affect each other but there is little agreement about the relative importance of these mechanisms. Creating good policy requires understanding the mechanisms at work.

Why did you choose South Africa?

South Africa is a fascinating place to do research. It is a middle-income country with very high levels of inequality, and is in transition politically, socially, economically, and epidemiologically. We find health problems characteristic of both developing countries (like infectious diseases and malnutrition) and more developed countries (like hypertension and diabetes). And the HIV/AIDS epidemic is really severe, particularly in Kwazulu-Natal Province, one of the areas where we are working. It is also a country where changing government policies provide an unusual opportunity to examine links between money and health.

What do you see as the long-term impact of this research?

There are a lot of questions that our data can help answer. For example, can money protect health status? Do financial supports like pensions and child-grants safeguard the health and well-being of the recipients and their families? What are the repercussions for children when a family’s main breadwinner has a prolonged illness or dies?

And those answers can help policymakers improve how they shape policies for a number of different social problems. For example, if extended families do provide adequate care for orphans, then government policies do not need to target them specifically. Truly understanding the relationship between health and income can have wide-ranging effects, impacting the welfare of people around the world.

Alicia Menendez studies economic development, poverty and inequality, household surveys, and household behavior. The first paper from her South African research, “Medical Compliance and Income-Health Gradients” (with co-authors Anne Case and Ingrid LeRoux), is forthcoming in American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings.