Title: Disease ecology meets economics

Abstract: Understanding why some human populations remain extremely poor despite current development trends around the world remains a mystery to the natural, social and mathematical sciences. The poor rely on their immediate natural environment for subsistence and suffer from high burdens of infectious diseases. We present a general framework for modeling the ecology of  poverty and disease, focusing on infectious diseases and renewable resources. Interactions between these ecological drivers of poverty and economics create reinforcing feedbacks resulting in three possible development regimes: 1) globally stable wealthy/healthy development, 2) globally stable unwealthy/unhealthy development, and 3) bistability. We show that the proportion of parameters leading to poverty is larger than that resulting in healthy/wealthy development; bistability consistently emerges as a general property of generalized disease-economic systems and that the systems under consideration are most sensitive to human disease parameters. The framework highlights feedbacks, processes and parameters that are important to measure in future studies of development, to identify effective and sustainable pathways out of poverty.