Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction
- PART I History as Critique: Debating the McKeown Thesis and the Postwar Policy Consensus
- PART II Historical Studies of the Response to the Public Health Challenges of Economic Growth in Nineteenth-Century Britain
- 6 Urbanization, Mortality, and the Standard of Living Debate: New Estimates of the Expectation of Life at Birth in Nineteenth-Century British Cities
- 7 Economic Growth, Disruption, Deprivation, Disease, and Death: on the Importance of the Politics of Public Health for Development
- 8 The G.R.O. and the Public Health Movement in Britain, 1837–1914
- 9 The Silent Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Government: The Rise of Local Government Expertise
- PART III History and Policy: From the Past to the Future
- Consolidated Bibliography
- Index
7 - Economic Growth, Disruption, Deprivation, Disease, and Death: on the Importance of the Politics of Public Health for Development
from PART II - Historical Studies of the Response to the Public Health Challenges of Economic Growth in Nineteenth-Century Britain
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction
- PART I History as Critique: Debating the McKeown Thesis and the Postwar Policy Consensus
- PART II Historical Studies of the Response to the Public Health Challenges of Economic Growth in Nineteenth-Century Britain
- 6 Urbanization, Mortality, and the Standard of Living Debate: New Estimates of the Expectation of Life at Birth in Nineteenth-Century British Cities
- 7 Economic Growth, Disruption, Deprivation, Disease, and Death: on the Importance of the Politics of Public Health for Development
- 8 The G.R.O. and the Public Health Movement in Britain, 1837–1914
- 9 The Silent Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Government: The Rise of Local Government Expertise
- PART III History and Policy: From the Past to the Future
- Consolidated Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Over the long term the processes of rapid economic growth seem to be strongly correlated with improvements in the prosperity and health of a society. Hence derives the commonplace notion that economic growth results in development. This essay argues that contrary to this widely held opinion, economic growth entails critical challenges and threats to the health and welfare of the populations involved and does not, therefore, necessarily produce development.
Since the 1940s economic and demographic historians, social scientists, and policymakers have broadly accepted that each national trajectory of sustained economic growth has always been attended by a “demographic transition,” a process in which a pronounced fall in national mortality levels (and also fertility levels) occurs as a result of the gains to national wealth. In fact the idea of a demographic transition, both as a theory and as a general historical model, has been subjected both to fundamental conceptual criticism and to empirical refutation. Important counter-examples have been uncovered, such as historic France with its fertility decline occurring before either rapid economic growth or mortality decline, and contemporary states, such as Kerala, Costa Rica, Sri Lanka, and China, where mortality has declined in advance of rapid wealth creation. Although there has been significant dissent, a glib post-World War II consensus has remained largely unperturbed: that economic growth causes mortality decline, principally through an epidemiological transition—a decline of infectious and communicable diseases.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Health and WealthStudies in History and Policy, pp. 203 - 241Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2005