Course Description
Examination of interactions among health, poverty, inequality, and development. Socioeconomic development improves population health and improved health, in turn, positively affects economic progress. Although poverty leads to poor health, evidence suggests that many households slide into poverty due to loss of life or the health of household members.
Athena Title
Health and Development
Equivalent Courses
Not open to students with credit in HPAM 7040E
Semester Course Offered
Offered spring and summer
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Course Objectives
Through this course, students will: • Familiarize themselves with the concept of socioeconomic development and its measurement. • Analyze various dimensions of economic progress. • Describe various methods of measuring population health status. • Analyze the relationship between development and health indicators. • Identify countries showing better than expected and less than expected population health status, given the level of socio-economic development of the countries. • Discuss important factors explaining superior health achievement or poor health achievement. • Explain measures of poverty and analyze poverty-economic development links. • Evaluate various approaches of poverty alleviation and the importance of health interventions in poverty alleviation. • Identify measures of socioeconomic and health inequality. • Assess the effect of income and asset inequality on health outcomes. • Evaluate the potential effects of health programs on overall socio-economic development.
Topical Outline
1. Introduction: defining and measuring socioeconomic development – GDP per capita, Physical Quality of Life, Human Development Index, and international comparisons 2. Measuring health status of population and dynamics of health status – mortality and morbidity based measures, nutritional status and anthropometry, QALY and DALY 3. Effect of economic progress on the health status of the population – cross-country and intertemporal analysis 4. Identifying exceptional country experiences; identifying the underlying reasons for poor health achievements in some middle/high-income countries and superior health achievements in some low-income countries 5. The concept of poverty, relative and absolute poverty; the international poverty line, Poverty lines across countries – methods of deriving a national poverty line: subjective and objective approaches 6. Effect of poverty on health – Comparing access to care by economic status; Health and poverty; How did the poverty-health relationship change over the years? 7. Measuring economic inequality and health inequality; Link between economic inequality and health outcomes 8. Negative health effects of economic growth – case studies (adverse health consequences of industrial development, agricultural projects, roads, and highways) 9. Consequences of adult ill-health on the composition of the household, medical care cost, production, consumption, investment, and income 10. Interrelationships among health, nutrition, and wage rate of workers; unemployment and health; efficiency wage and nutritional status 11. Effects of improved health on human capital formation; educational attainment; labor productivity; investment in material capital and technology adoption