ASSIGNMENT #1: REFLECTIVE WRITING
Women's Health and Economic Development
The most thought-provoking thing I realized is that women’s health is also
an economic issue in Vietnam. In the introduction session of this course, I
came to know that economic growth and economic development, which human development is an important indicator, do not
always go hand in hand, as evidenced by the very different position of
countries in GDP per capita rankings
compared with human development rankings. However, the linkage between health
conditions and economic growth is believed to be stronger.
A possible implication of the linkage of women’s
health and economic growth is that income critically affects women’s health (Bloom and Canning, 2000). First, it implies
that rising GDP per capita involve an
improvement in food and nutrition among the poor, which is apparently a precondition for
better health. Second, increasing
national income also puts more budgets for governments to spend on essential public health. Even if the proportion of
public health spending to GDP remains unchanged, rising GDP per capita means
rising per capita public spending on health (Ghosh, 2011). This might result to better
quality of basic public health services and also allow governments to spend more on infrastructure such as better housing, safe drinking water and
sanitation. Such public spending
has the most direct effect on the health
of women and girls, who are less likely to access healthcare if the household
budget is limited.
This new understanding helps me to see the other side of an issue. Before, I just can see one side of how
health affects income, but now it subjects to the
problem of reverse causality; income also affects health. This insight is connected with the fact that infant
and maternal mortality rates should improve more quickly in countries where per
capita incomes are growing faster. For example, recently, Vietnam is considered as a dynamic country with a quite
impressive growth in GDP per capita income, 6% per annum (World Bank). In
Vietnam, from 2000-2013, the infant mortality
rate fell by 30% to 19 per thousand in 2013 and the maternal
mortality rate fell by 18% to 49 per
100,000 in 2013 (World Bank).
This insight into the mutual relationship of health and economic growth will
be useful not only for this course but also for my further study which deal
with evaluating public policy related to women’s health in some Asian countries.
Particularly, with this understanding I can help myself to realize why in
Vietnam, women’s health along with economic growth significantly improved, whereas,
in India there was a growing divide between economic growth and women’s health that Ghosh (2011) claims it is really the result of poor public health policy.
References
1.
Bloom, D. E., & Canning, D. (2000).
The Health and Wealth of Nations. Science, 287: 1207–8.
2. Ghosh, J.
(2011). Economic growth and women’s health outcomes: A deepening divide?, UCL
Lancet Lecture, University College London.
3. The World
Bank <http://www.worldbank.org/>
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