Socioeconomic Factors and Health Outcome Metrics in Africa: Cross-national Comparisons from 1995-2011

摘要

In the past 2 decades, many countries in the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS: Member countries include Ghana, Gambia, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Cote D'Ivoire, Benin, Togo, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Mauritania, Mali, Senegal, Niger, and Cape Verde) have introduced health care policies that have led to reforms. The health care reforms are efforts directed toward containment of public spending on health services while at the same time achieving better health outcomes. However, the improvement of population health outcomes also could be dependent on the health care system and its resource inputs as well as non-health-related issues. The definition and measurement of health outcomes are deemed as the first teething problem that needs to be addressed before one can proceed to estimate a health production function. At the moment, there is no concrete measure that could be employed to measure health outcomes to encompass the various facets of health status at both the macro level and on a comparable basis across economies. However, we contend that the best population health outcomes metric ought to reflect a population's vibrant state of mental, social, and physical well-being. This implies that for a country to experience a positive health status, its population should be mentally, socially, and physically sound, and have a sense of well-being to keep it alive. In this letter, we focus on 3 population health metrics: (1) under-5 mortality; (2) life expectancy at birth; and (3) infant mortality.