In much the same way one's indebtedness affects his health, government's indebtedness with official development assistance and other funding institutions does affect the health of the nation.

No one, of course, needs to be reminded that basic services, like health and shelter, take their inertia from the government's ability to pay for the costs of delivery. If this obvious fact is cited here, it is only to emphasize the question on how can government find the needed cash to deliver these services in the face of scheduled amortization, say, for roads and bridges and coastal reclamation, creating a deep hole in its pocket.

Indeed state-of-the-art infrastructure projects make good economic impressions. It is, for example, supposed to attract investments and create employment. But will such projects reduce the vulnerability of children under five years from dying from preventable diseases? Sadly, however, children remain vulnerable to such diseases, their influence on the level of the country's morbidity and mortality staying high.

The statistics in all annual reports of the Human Development Index (HDI) seem to suggest this fact of mortality and morbidity in heavily indebted countries.

The United Nations Development Programme, in its attempt to view the impact of development on the peoples' well being, designed HDI using mathematical models for education, parity income and longevity as a basic measuring tool.

True, in the current International Monetary Fund listing, the Philippines is nowhere to be found among the first top 10 borrowers. In which case, therefore, it could easily have flaunted that, in comparison with Brazil and Mexico, the country is now about to leap up to its new status as a worry-free economy.

This, however, is not quite the situation. Unlike the flow of money in and out which can be made to mesmerize by accountants willing to rig accounting records, the deplorable health conditions of many in poor communities cannot be doctored in the same way. In fact, this is precisely the question why, in the steadily rising GNP, people still die of preventable diseases.

And to think that the logic of good economics should have been applicable to good health. Clearly, something is basically wrong somewhere.

(Leonardo V. Chiu, OD is a director of Counterpart International Inc., a Washington D.C.-based firm dealing in development, political risks and crisis management. He is also consultant to Misyun!.)
 

Back to Page 1