Studies find economic boom can sometimes be health bust
Posted on Monday, December 1, 2008
Many people are worried about the health of the economy. But does the economy also affect their health ?
It does, but not always in ways you might expect. The data on how an economic slowdown influences an individual’s health are surprisingly mixed.
It’s clear that long-term economic gains lead to improvements in a population’s overall health, in developing and industrialized societies alike.
But whether the current economy will take a toll on your own health depends, in part, on your health habits when times are good.
And economic studies suggest that people tend not to take care of themselves in boom times — drinking too much (especially before driving ), dining on calorie-laden restaurant meals and skipping exercise and doctors ’ appointments because of workrelated time commitments.
“The value of time is higher during good economic times,” said Grant Miller, an assistant professor of medicine at Stanford School of Medicine at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif. “So people work more and do less of the things that are good for them, like cooking at home and exercising; and people experience more stress due to the rigors of hard work during booms.”
Similar patterns have been
. Miller, who is studying the effects of fluctuating coffee prices on health in Colombia, says that even though falling prices are bad for the economy, they appear to improve health and mortality rates. When prices are low, Colombian laborers have more time to care for their children. “When coffee prices suddenly rise, people work harder on their coffee plots and spend less time doing things around the home, including things that are good for their children,” he said. “Because the things that matter most for infant and child health in rural Colombia aren’t expensive, but require a substantial amount of time — such as breast-feeding, bringing clean water from far away, taking your child to a distant health clinic for free vaccinations — infant and child mortality rates rise.” In this country, a similar effect appeared in the Dust Bowl during the Great Depression, according to a 2007 paper by Miller and colleagues published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The data seem to contradict research in the 1970 s suggesting that in hard times there are more deaths from heart disease, cirrhosis of the liver, suicide and homicide, as well as more admissions to mental hospitals. But those findings have not been replicated, and several economists have found flaws in the research.
In May 2000, the Quarterly Journal of Economics published a surprising paper called “Are Recessions Good for Your Health ?” by Christopher J. Ruhm, professor of economics at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, based on an analysis measuring death rates and health behavior against economic shifts and jobless rates from 1972 to 1991.
Ruhm found that death rates declined sharply in the 1974 and 1982 recessions, and increased in the economic recovery of the 1980 s. An increase of one percentage point in state unemployment rates correlated with a 0. 5 percentage point decline in the death rate — or about 5 fewer deaths per 100, 000 people. Over all, the death rate fell by more than 8 percent in the 20-year period of economic decline led by drops in heart disease and car crashes.
The economic downturn did appear to take a toll on factors having less to do with prevention and more to do with mental well-being and access to health care. For instance, cancer deaths rose 23 percent, and deaths from flu and pneumonia increased slightly. Suicides rose 2 percent, homicides 12 percent.
The issue that may matter most in an economic crisis is whether there is an adequate health safety net available to those who have lost their jobs and insurance.
During a decade of economic recession in Japan that began in the 1990 s, people who were unemployed were twice as likely to be in poor health than those with secure jobs. During Peru’s severe economic crisis in the 1980 s, infant mortality jumped 2. 5 percentage points — about 17, 000 more children who died as public health spending and social programs collapsed.
In August, researchers from the Free University of Amsterdam looked at health studies of twins in Denmark. They found that individuals born in a recession were at higher risk for heart problems later in life and lived, on average, 15 months less than those born under better conditions.
Gerard J. van den Berg, an economics professor who was a co-author of the study, said babies in poor households suffered the most in a recession, because their families lacked access to good health care. Poor economic conditions can also cause stress that may interfere with parent bonding and childhood development, he said.
He noted that other studies had found that recessions can benefit babies by giving their parents more time at home.
“This scenario may be relevant for well-to-do families where one of the parents loses a job and the other still brings in enough money,” he said. “But in a crisis where the family may have to incur huge housing-cost losses and the household income is insufficient for adequate nutrition and health care, the adverse effects of being born in a recession seem much more relevant.”
In this country in May, the market-research firm Information Resources reported that 53 percent of consumers said they were cooking from scratch more than they did just six months before.
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