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Per Capita incomes of Tropical countries  could be more than double if they managed to reduce their health burden from vector-borne and parasitic diseases to that of  temperate countries.

Scientistss from Harvard Medical School and Princeton University in the United States and from Université de Cergy-Pontoise in France tried to find out whether these diseases  played any role in delaying tropical countries’ growth by limiting foreign investment and institutions’ development, or whether environmental factors present in the tropics are the key element driving the VBPDs — which in turn still harming wealth production today.

Study found that biodiversity loss is likely to damage the economy by causing more disease. For example, if a country with relatively high biodiversity, such as Indonesia, were to lose 15 per cent of its biodiversity, the disease burden would be expected to rise by about 30 per cent, according to findings of the study.

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