Welfare dependence and poverty traps: evaluating the contribution of health shocks and health policy using administrative data

The objective is to investigate the extent to which public health provision
enhances the capacity for social protection. The poor are more vulnerable to
disease, and poor health can perpetuate poverty and welfare dependency. We will
contribute new evidence on synergies between income support and public health,
relevant to sustaining cash transfers on a wide scale, especially under austerity.
We also contribute to work on sustainable cities insofar as we study epidemics
that diffuse more rapidly in dense urban areas. Previous attempts to identify
causal effects of health on poverty have been frustrated by the poor being more
likely to suffer health shocks, making it hard to isolate cause from effect. We will
address this challenge by analysing administrative individual longitudinal data on
the entire population of welfare recipients in Brazil, linked to hospital, clinic and
vital statistics data, and using exogenous variation in local epidemic infection
rates.