Explain about the Health Economics and Economics of Malnutrition?
In the earlier units on nutritional problems, we learnt that there are many causes of malnutrition, socioeconomic cause, being one of them. When economic condition of the people is poor, they have inadequate access to food and health services, which contributes to poor nutritional status. We also studied that some micronutrient deficiencies like anaemia and iodine deficiency compromise on mental and physical work capacity, which leads to lowered productivity of individuals at work. This, in turn, leads to reduction in wages earned and poor economic condition. So we can see that poor economic status contributes to malnutrition and malnutrition contributes to poor economic status. There is a mutual cause and effect relationship between malnutrition and economic status. In this unit, we are going to explore this relationship in detail. We are going to study about economics of health and economic consequences of malnutrition. Since nutrition is a determinant of health, we will discuss about nutrition economics under which we will focus our discussion oil food resources and their efficient utilization to improve nutritional status of individuals. At the end, we will explore the concept of economic evaluation of health/nutrition interventions.