Is the Link between Poverty and Mortality Changing?

While poverty is often associated with poor nutrition, poor health and high mortality, that association might be changing, according to an Economic Synopses essay. In particular, there is an association between poverty and low mortality worldwide, which Assistant Vice President Guillaume Vandenbroucke said is “a recent phenomenon.”

Declining Mortality Rates

Vandenbroucke discussed the decrease in mortality rates in the world over the past 50 to 100 years. He focused on the crude death rate, which refers to the number of deaths in a given year relative to the number of people at the beginning of the year. He found that:

• For the world, the crude death rate was 15 per 1,000 in 1961 versus 7.6 per 1,000 in 2013.
• For the U.S., the crude death rate was 9.3 per 1,000 in 1961 versus 8.2 per 1,000 in 2013.

“Thus, the world at large has caught up with and even slightly outperformed the U.S. in terms of decreased mortality,” he wrote.

In fact, the crude death rate for the world as a percentage of the U.S. rate declined from 161% in 1961 to 92% in 2013, he pointed out. (See the figure below, which is from the Economic Synopses essay.)

Possible Factors behind Lower Mortality

Vandenbroucke examined several factors that could account for the decline of mortality: economic growth, better access to food and poor countries’ better ability to fight infections at a low cost.

He noted that the world has remained about 80% poorer than the U.S. overall, in terms of real GDP per capita. “Thus, even though the world is not catching up to the U.S. in wealth, it is catching up in health,” he wrote.

Regarding food supply, he noted that the world is not catching up (or losing ground) in terms of calories available per person. “Better health in the world relative to the U.S. is not due to a better availability of food. It’s not clear whether it’s a result of better distribution of food or other factors,” he wrote.

Vandenbroucke did note that some disease-prevention techniques (such as spraying DDT to fight malaria) went from rich countries to poor countries. The success of these techniques “depended on how prevalent they became in these poor countries, given that costly improvements in health care infrastructure were not prevalent,” he explained.

Overall Population Growth

Vandenbroucke noted that mortality rates are similar in poor countries and rich countries, but births remain significantly higher in the former. “The world’s population is increasing mostly in poor countries as a result of both reduced mortality and relatively high fertility,” he wrote.

In poor countries, poverty and elevated fertility go hand in hand, and neither is declining in any significant way, he noted.

“But the death rates in these countries are declining, all of which means the world's population is growing and so is its share of poor,” he concluded.