ABSTRACT
More importantly, most poverty alleviation and food security programs are not developed with improving health or health equity as a key objective, and as a result, improvements in health are not optimized with traditional development approaches. The effects of infectious diseases like COVID-19 on economic outcomes serve as yet another illustration of the strong positive correlation established between health and wealth over decades of economics research. [...]a vibrant literature in economics has demonstrated a strong bidirectional relationship between health and economic outcomes in both low- and high-income countries [8]. [...]in the field of economics, the past two decades have witnessed a revolution in scientific methods for learning how to end poverty and improve well-being in low- and middle-income countries. Engendered by different crises and challenges, these matters play out differently in unique cultural and social environments. Since the 1950s and 1960s, humans have been transforming and disrupting most of our planet’s natural systems at a much-accelerated pace, from the deep oceans to the upper atmosphere, causing loss of biodiversity, overexploitation of fisheries, rising carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, acidification of oceans, and loss of tropical forests.