Essay: Gender Economics And Public Health - Challenges And Opportunities.

Chapters and sources attached must be used. Other sources are acceptable. Essay on a contemporary economic topic relevant to Public Health.

Write a  (excluding references) essay arguing that ‘Understanding economics is crucial to effective Public Health practice’.

The Link Between Poverty and Public Health

Public health can be sated as a science of protecting the safety and by improving the health of the communities with respect of education which also includes policy making and research for diseases. Poverty affects the economic prosperity of the community along with productivity with an increased crime. Poverty and economic marginalization usually provide a lot of stress and social issue to the community leaders. The economics of reproduction is also significant for understanding the presence of economic inequality presence between men and women along with various cultural group (Blau, 2016). There is a presence of gender inequalities in the labour market as well as in the educational outcomes.

Gendered economics refers to the influence of gender on economics along with the influence on gender. Despite the rising influence of the patriarchy along with conservative sentiments, women are very well managing the business and various others jobs (Elias & Rai, 2015).  The female entrepreneurs play a very important role for increasing diversication in business. Feminist economics can be stated as a critical study of economics which focuses on gender awareness and consists of inclusive economic inquiry along with policy analysis.

Gender gaps are one of the significant challenges present in the recent market today. Globally it had been found out that women are comparatively less likely to be participated in the labour market and therefore are also less likely to find jobs which also restricts the quality employment opportunities (Jayachandran, 2015). Women who have a spouse or a partner are combatively less likely to participate in the emerging labour market. However, women suffering from severe poverty are more likely to participate in the labour market irrespective of the gender norms. In case of developing countries, the probability of participating in the workforce have risen by 7.8%. The lack of affordable care for children will affect the participation of women negatively. Another major factor which affects women’s participation in the labour market is the limited access to safe transportation. According to the report of the World Bank, it has been found out that in underdeveloped countries women does not face the same social, legal and economic rights. The gender gaps are huge in the underdeveloped countries because both inequality poverty have broadened in those countries since the women always cannot have control over resources. It has been seen that women earn quite a less amount of money in average than men in some of the advanced industrialized countries. Although, it is known that women are more likely to work for longer hours when compared to the men. In most cases only the option of par time work will be available in the market. It is also to be seen that the choices of women to work in a paid job are constrained to large number of factors. Gender inequality can be termed as an idea where men and women are not equally looked after. Although there has been increase in the participation in the labour market by women there, still there is an existence of barriers to equality (Tak,  Correll & Soule, 2017). Though in the recent years most of the women of the working age are in employment, it has been found out that in professions of high status they are underrepresented.  Not only they are under represented in the higher level of the occupational structure, they did not achieve equality of pay.  Though it is known that the wage gap is narrowing, however the pay divide is still a matter of concern

Gender Economics and the Labor Market

Economic evaluation has been highly used to inform decisions on the allocation of the healthcare resources(Issel & Wells, 2017). On a broad range of interventions in healthcare, there had been presence of huge interest in exploration of effectiveness of the cost. The reason behind this is that interventions of public health engross health resources and are also related to the opportunity cost.  Economic evaluations are highly used in order to inform about decisions about allocating various healthcare resources. The various ways of economic evaluation in terms of health care is based on pharmaceutical paradigm. However, according to few economists there is presence of drawbacks of the methods of economic evaluation when applied to the public health. Economic evaluation has been proven to be quite influential at the practice level of public health when different means exist of achieving a specific health goal. The public health professionals should look into the  health needs of a population with decision making which will be evidence based with helping the health community to identify and compare the different activities (Blau, 2016). The term economic evaluation is termed as the systematic appraisal of costs and benefits of the project which is used to determine the economic efficiency of the programs. The term Economic evaluation can also be termed as using economic evidence while making decision.

Poverty and the worldwide poor health is highly linked to each other. The marginalised population are those people who are not included in the cultural, political and social life. Marginalization are also termed as social exclusion is a process where individuals and people are not given access to various rights and opportunities (Issel & Wells, 2017). The main cause behind the poor health comprises of social and economic injustices. Poverty can be said to be both the cause and consequences of poor health and in this way poverty can increase the chance of poor health. The various types of structures of political and economic structures which will strengthen poverty along with discrimination are needed to be changed so that poverty and poor health can be tackled. The people who are the most affected consists of the most vulnerable individuals and the marginalised groups. The marginalised groups are often deprived of the money and access to proper health services (Jayachandran, 2015). The tropical diseases which are often neglected impacts over one billion people affects the poorest and marginalised communities. These diseases cause life-long disabilities to the people. The biggest killers are related to mainly to poor nutrition and cardiovascular disease. When lives are lost it means reduced economic productivity. The productivity also reduces when people are ill. Spread of various airborne diseases which includes tuberculosis and various other respiratory infections are mainly spread from overcrowded and poor living conditions. As the burden of caring most of the times are taken by the females, they miss out their opportunities of education.

Economic Evaluation in Public Health

The concepts related to promotion of health and prevention of disease have come into existence in 1986 in the International Conference on Health Promotion. The concept of health promotion is associated to health education. The aim of the health education is make people aware of the health consequences. Health economics can therefore contributes a lot to the health promotion and which is often neglected by the economists. Both the health promotion and disease prevention have a huge role to play in health policy. Various market failures can create an economic rationale in case of government intervention in case of promotion of health and disease prevention in order to improve social welfare (Elias & Rai, 2015). Economic perspective consists of costs associated with diseases which can be both related to medical care and productivity loses. The use of different types of taxes and subsidies will improve the efficiency of market exchanges. Like an example a government can impose a tax on a consumption which will generate negative externality. Government intervention in health promotion and in case of disease prevention have significant

Conclusion:

It can be concluded from the above report that gender economics is a newly emerging field which works on the theories of diversity and promotes the value of gender balance. Gendered economy has a strong connection with the public health where gender can be referred to the relationships between people along with the distribution of power. Gender equality is significant in the economy which includes equal rights, responsibilities and opportunities of all people. The data which is generally sex disaggregated shows that in the world men usually have a shorter life expectancy. It has been found out that gender influences health and wellbeing all over three domains. Therefore, gender responsive health systems should be promoted in order to reduce health inequalities.

Reference:

Blau, F. D. (2016). Gender, inequality, and wages. OUP Catalogue.

Brownson, R. C., Baker, E. A., Deshpande, A. D., & Gillespie, K. N. (2017). Evidence-based public health. Oxford university press.

Donehower, G., Fürnkranz-Prskawetz, A., Lee, R. D., Lee, S. H., Mason, A., Miller, T., ... & Soyibo, A. (2017). Counting Women’s Work: Measuring the gendered economy in the market and at home.

Drummond, M. F., Sculpher, M. J., Claxton, K., Stoddart, G. L., & Torrance, G. W. (2015). Methods for the economic evaluation of health care programmes. Oxford university press.

Elias, J., & Rai, S. (2015). The everyday gendered political economy of violence. Politics & Gender, 11(2), 424-429.

Issel, L. M., & Wells, R. (2017). Health program planning and evaluation. Jones & Bartlett Learning.

Jayachandran, S. (2015). The roots of gender inequality in developing countries. economics, 7(1), 63-88.

Stiglitz, J. E., & Rosengard, J. K. (2015). Economics of the public sector: Fourth international student edition. WW Norton & Company.

Tak, E., Correll, S., & Soule, S. A. (2017). Gender Inequality in Product Markets: When and How Status Beliefs Transfer to Products. In Academy of Management Proceedings (Vol. 2017, No. 1, p. 10114). Briarcliff Manor, NY 10510: Academy of Management.

Vedung, E. (2017). Public policy and program evaluation. Routledge.

Wagner, C., Garcia, D., Jadidi, M., & Strohmaier, M. (2015, April). It's a Man's Wikipedia? Assessing Gender Inequality in an Online Encyclopedia. In ICWSM (pp. 454-463).

Wilson, F. M. (2017). Organizational behaviour and gender. Routledge.