ENVIRON 538: Global Environmental Health. Economics and Policy

Course summary

Social science perspective on global environmental health. Students will learn to identify primary environmental causes of high burden diseases such as malaria, diarrhea, and respiratory infections; understand how individual behavior affect and relate to environmental health; describe how to measure socio-economic impacts of global environmental health diseases; discuss key policies to control global environmental health problems based on private prevention and therapeutic behaviors; and propose frameworks to empirically monitor and evaluate global environmental health policies.

Prerequisites: Introductory course in statistics.

 Objectives

By the end of the course, students should be able to:

  • Define environmental health in the context of public health, conservation & development policy;
  • Gain exposure to a selection of key papers, books and reports related to global environmental health issues;
  • Gain exposure to tools of impact evaluation and economic analysis for understanding environmental health behaviors, and analyzing and designing more effective policy solutions;
  • Apply  statistical  methods  to  examine  the  empirical  bases  of  environmental  health  puzzles, particularly for environmental quality valuation, and evaluation of health behavior interventions; and
  • Write a paper that draws on 1‐4 to describe a concrete empirical application.

Syllabus ENVIRON 538 Fall 2014