India, Jan. 2 -- Do countries with high GDP growth become healthy over time? Or is it the other way around? Can countries create wealth in the long term if their population is not healthy or educated?

For a very long time, the prevailing wisdom among economists was that wealth produced health: Grow GDP, and better health would naturally follow. If countries were sick, it was because they were poor. Growth, therefore, was the cure.

That changed in 1993, with the publication of the World Development Report 1993 (WDR 1993), by the World Bank and its deceptively simple idea. The report, through extensive research and examples concluded that health is not merely a consequence of development - it is one of its preconditions. Investing in heal...