Do Socio-economic Development and Improvement of Health Go Together?

Abstract

Socio-economic development in a country is very much linked with the improvement of overall status of health of the people in the country. The causality works both ways. However, the degree of relations between the two varies over region and time. This article is an attempt to show how health status is linked with the socio-economic status in different states of India. The health status is seen only for children and women and the data are taken from National Family Health Surveys (NFHS-2 and NFHS-3). For other development parameters National Sample Survey (NSS) data are used. The socio-economic variables taken for this purpose are head count ratio, real mean consumption, sex ratio, literacy level and infant mortality rate whereas the health variables are mainly the morbidity parameters like acute respiratory infection, diarrhoea, anaemia and low nutritional status. The results show that a decrease in the incidence of disease is directly associated with an increase in the socio-economic development, at least in the southern states. In addition to calculating the correlations between pairwise variables, we have found the rank correlation between the average of ranks of socio-economic variables and of health variables. We have also found the canonical correlations between the two sets of variables. The two correlations agreed very well. This was done separately for rural and urban sectors.