Economics

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Gone in Six Seconds: HIV/AIDS and Poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa
(2007) Jones, Chloe; Ball, Richard J.
Every six seconds, someone in world contracts HIV. Every ten seconds, someone in the world loses their life to AIDS. Sub-Saharan Africa bears the majority of the burden posed by the HIV/AIDS pandemic, as well as suffering the effects of decades of overwhelming and unrelenting poverty rates. This paper investigates the effect of individual and country-level characteristics on the determination of HIV-status, in an attempt to understand the complex relationship between HIV/AIDS and poverty in sub-Saharan Africa. Using linear probability models with a variety of measures of poverty and inequality, this study finds individual characteristics to be more jointly significant in the determination of HIV-status than country characteristics. Access to a toilet with running water and a reduction in the Human Poverty Index are found to be the most statistically significant variables in the reduction of an individual's probability of being HIV-positive. These findings suggest that poverty-reduction strategies aimed at mitigating the effects of HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa should be directed at increasing the welfare of the region’s poorest individuals through increased access to resources in an effort directly decrease the number of individuals at a high risk for contracting the virus.