Faculty Commentary: Dr. Jain

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Posted on February 15, 2022 by MCOB Outreach

MCOB Outreach

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Population Aging Amidst Economic Development

Does your health determine your economic outcomes? Most likely. Poor health means days or even months of missed education or labor force participation. The adverse effects of ill-health can be far reaching, from cradle to grave, beginning with one’s health as a fetus affecting long-term outcomes. What about the opposite – does your economic status affect your health outcomes? Most of us would agree that it does. Being economically better-off means we can invest more in our health, thereby lowering the probability of adverse health outcomes. It also means we are more prepared to pay for such adverse outcomes if they do arise. Such questions at the intersection of economics and health are fascinating, complex, and relevant to all of us. These are exactly the kinds of issues health economics explores, which can be summarized as the causes and consequences of poor health, at any point during or over the entire human life course. 

My interest in health preceded my first brush with economics. It was incredibly fortuitous that I was able to combine the two aspects of life that interested me the most, and that affect huge swathes of the human population – what happens to health outcomes in environments of economic scarcity, and what happens to economic outcomes when individuals have poor health? Over the course of history, population health has benefited immensely as our economic conditions improved, allowing us to spend more resources on health. Over the past fifty years alone, infant and child mortality rates dropped dramatically and the increase in life expectancy around the world has been unprecedented. 

Population aging is one of the most significant demographic transformations of the twenty-first century and is predicted to progress rapidly in developing countries. This will have wide-ranging social, economic, and public health implications. For example, is there a metric that can be used to identify whether an older population’s health is worsening rapidly? If so, are there certain sub-groups, like those with lowest incomes, for whom this decline is the fastest? Or does high income not matter if an individual is in an overall low-resource setting where access to health care is limited? Such an examination of population level health outcomes among older adults can be useful when formulating government policy, allowing us to identify high risk groups. Such a metric should also be easy and cheap to measure, especially if resources are limited. In my research on older adults in Indonesia, that’s exactly what we do. We find that age-related height loss, especially extreme height loss, is a predictor of a range of poor health outcomes which matter for older adults, like lower cognitive ability, higher likelihood of disability, and most strikingly, higher likelihood of mortality. Such height loss is also more pronounced among women, those with lower education, and lower economic status. Height loss is easy to measure. Hence, clinicians, public health officials, and the government can use this metric to focus on aging sub-populations vulnerable to poor health.

Older adults in low-income countries faced worse socioeconomic conditions and riskier disease environments in early-life and thereafter, relative to those in higher income countries, resulting in cumulative disadvantages over the life course. Compared to the more advanced economies, relatively little is known about aging in environments of relative scarcity. My research contributes to narrowing this gap in the literature on the economics of aging. My work has the potential to inform policy aiming at improving older adults’ health and well-being in developing countries, which is in a relatively nascent stage.

 

 

Urvashi Jain, PhD

Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, Finance and Real Estate

Mitchell College of Business

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