In this paper we link endogenous fertility, endogenous longevity, economic growth and public policies – represented by public health investments and child policies – in a basic overlapping generations model. We found that there even exist four equilibria, and thus low and high development regimes, which may be, however, determined by government policies, and concluded that when fertility is endogenous, increasing public health is always beneficial allowing economies to escape from poverty and, hence, to prosper. The same conclusion holds for the child tax policy. In particular, the latter result may be in accord with, for instance, the tremendous development experienced by China where a restrictive one child per family policy forced by the government planned and restricted the size of Chinese families, probably allowing some geographic areas within China to escape from poverty.
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Paper provided by Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche (DSE), University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy in its series Discussion Papers with number
2009/91.