The health and wealth question
Many people assume that a richer country will also have healthier people. It sounds sensible. Money can pay for doctors, hospitals, medicines and good food, so a wealthy country should be able to keep its people well.
In development studies, an assumption like this has to be tested against evidence. The debatable question here is Is health linked to wealth? To answer it, you compare two pieces of data for a group of countries. The first is how long people live on average. The second is how much money people have on average. Then you look for countries that break the pattern and work out possible reasons.
The average number of years a person in a country can expect to live. It is often used as a measure of how healthy a population is.
The average amount of money per person in a country in a year, given here in international dollars ($). These are US dollars adjusted for purchasing power parity, which takes into account how much money can buy in each country. It is used as a measure of how wealthy a country is.
Notice that both measures are averages. An average describes a whole country with a single number, so it can hide big differences between people. That detail becomes important when you meet countries that do not fit the pattern. Life expectancy and income are also only two of many ways to judge development, and the lesson on development and poverty shows how they are combined in wider measures such as the HDI.
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