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Health

How Does Health Matter?

Angus Deaton is an economist who has studied the aggregate health levels in countries though indices such as average life expectancy and compared them to another of other factors. He and many other economists have found that there are strong correlations between health and income and there is an enormous amount of inequality in the world on both measures. He states that people in poor countries live shorter lives than people in rich countries so that, if we take income and health together, there is more inequality in the world than if we consider income alone. However, he also states that if you looked at other factors such as education, telephones per household, or percentage of the population who owns cars would also correlate with health and the graphs would look almost identical to the health and income.

However, many people have expected for health to rise with income as developing countries continue to develop yet this does not appear to necessarily be the case. Although continued development has been shown to reduce the levels of poverty it has not shown to improve health conditions as many have thought. The lecturer noted that many of the health conditions that plague poorer nations does not necessarily require state of the art technology. Rather many conditions that lower the life expectancy can be treated with low tech solutions. One such problem is that there are many people in poorer nations that die from diseases that can be treated with ordinary antibiotics. These antibiotics can be produced inexpensively and could substantially improve health conditions in poorer nations.

The life expectancy dispersion among the countries of the world decreased after World War II but then started to the 1990s. However, much of this can be explained by the emergence of the spread of HIV / AIDS as well as the breakup of the Soviet Union and there diminishing health care quality after the Soviet countries split up and formed many smaller nations. Many countries were also able to make massive improvements in health care in small periods of time. One country in the 1940s was able to improve their average life expectancy by two years after every single year had passed. Much of this vast improvement was due to the eradication of malaria. However, over the course of global development the trend remained fairly constant over time.