Title:	Population and Health in Developing Countries
Authors:	Maryse Gaimard
Keywords:	Health
Issue Date:	2014
Publisher:	Springer
Description:	The relationships between health and development are well-documented and are widely recognized among experts (Sachs 2006; Severino 2008; Severino and Ray 2010). Health is both the cause and the consequence of development. Research on health in developing countries, which had once focused on the impact of the health of populations on macroeconomic variables, has come increasingly to adopt a microeconomic approach to the analysis of health systems. The notion of development has also changed and developed. The notion of development defi ned as economic growth has given way to the concept of ‘human’ development and (more recently) to the notion of ‘sustainable’ development (Tizio 2004). The concept of development has changed signifi cantly in contemporary economic thought. The defi nition of development as economic growth measured based on GDP or per capita GDP has clear limitations. From a sociological perspective, development has also been defi ned as the social dynamics of a society entering a new stage of civilization. However, in the last two decades, research on development has increasingly incorporated the notion of individual autonomy (in addition to the concept of economic growth) (Barthelemy 2006). The United Nations Development Programme (or UNDP) defi nes ‘human’ development as the process of expanding the opportunities available to individuals: ‘individuals are the real wealth of a nation. Human develop ment can be defi ned as a process of enlarging people’s choices and building human capabilities (the range of things people can be and do), enabling them to: live a long and healthy life, have access to knowledge, have a decent standard of living and participate in the life of their community and the decisions that affect their lives’. The assumption is that economic growth is a necessary condition for development. In line with the neoclassical model of growth, the causal link was assumed to be from income to health – i.e. a higher level of income facilitates access to ways of living and to goods and services that contribute to improving nutrition and health, but also results in an improvement of education, which in turn leads to better health and hygiene behaviors. Increased income is also a form of protection against exogenous shocks, including health shocks such as epidemics. ‘The analysis of the contribution of health to development was burdened by the general limitations of the neoclassical model, including the exogenous nature of technical progress and the diffi cult of accounting for long-term growth because of the hypothesis of diminishing returns to capital’ (Moatti and Ventelou 2009).
URI:	http://10.6.20.12:80/handle/123456789/53064
ISBN:	978-94-007-6793-5
Appears in Collections:	Population Studies

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