Progress in Health around the World

Abstract

Health is a key component of human development. This article looks at how health is measured, and the convergence of health across countries. We argue that health measures should account for illness as well as mortality, but in practice life expectancy is a reasonable proxy for population health. While health is improving we see two distinct groups of countries in the data, clustering around different long run steady states. Many countries have experienced large health gains without prior income gains and in countries not affected by HIV/AIDS the last 40 years have been a success story in terms of health.