During the early 1990s, the world began to accept that there is a complex, but close-knit relationship between health and poverty. Being poor is bad for your health. But being ill also reduces your chances of getting out of poverty. There is new data about the extent to which ill-health is impacting on the economy of some communities and nations. Much of this data focuses on Africa but the trends are universal.
Malaria shaves off as much as one per cent of GDP growth in the hardest affected countries.
There is an increasing recognition of the sheer difficulty faced by developing nations as they seek to counter these health threats. But data also suggest a direct relationship between health and economic development. As we saw in Europe at the end of the 19 th and beginning of the 20 th century, developing countries which invest relatively more, and well, on health are likely to achieve higher economic growth. Here in East Asia, for example, life expectancy increased by over 18 years in the two decades that preceded the most dramatic economic take-off in history. A recent analysis for the Asian Development Bank concluded that fully a third of the phenomenal Asian economic growth between 1965 and 1997 resulted from investment in people s health.