Today one of the hottest issues, which is being discussed almost every where in different contexts is “globalization and its impacts”. Today every country across the world has become a part of the vast global village where country barriers in social, political and economic life are becoming lower than before. Impacts of globalization have been started to be felt almost in every sphere of life.
It has been theorized that increasing economic integration among countries would result in higher level of economic growth which would translate into improvement in overall standard of living of the people. If standard of living rises, then it can be expected that this will have positive effect on the health status. Hence, the process of globalization has the potential to increase health status of the people living in a country.
As far as the relationship between globalization and health is concerned, WHO (World Health Organization) states that different manifestations of globalization affect health status. For example, increased international trade, improved communications at global level, increased inflows as well as outflows of goods and services as well as of people from one nation to another nation have influenced health outcomes. According to WHO, some of these impacts are direct, while some are indirect. Among the direct effects, the most important one is the effect of different types of multilateral trade agreements on the health systems. For example, TRIPS (Trade-Related aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) significantly affect the costs of medicines and drugs as well as their availability.
Among the other direct effects, some of the important ones are as follows:
- Improved communication technologies have made it very easier to alert health authorities of different countries regarding the outbreak of a specific disease. In this globalized era, nations can share health related information very easily.
- Increasing trade, migration, tourism, on the other hand facilitate the spread of different types of infectious diseases.
- Some global phenomenon like illegal drug trades which are beyond the control of any particular government also affects health.
The indirect effects, on the other hand, come through the effects of globalization on national economy. For example, Trade liberalization along with financial laws affects the level of public expenditure on health care system.
Although apparently it seems that globalization is helpful in increasing health status, but it would not be right to make a overly simplistic statement by describing globalization as good for health. As stated by WHO, effects of globalization on health can be either good or bad. For instance, in highly developed countries, there exists high level of threats of acquiring several epidemic infections like HIV/AIDs, plague, tuberculosis, etc from less increasing interaction with less developed countries. These rich nations also fear that increasing unhealthy population through migration would increase their expenditure on health systems. It should, however, not be right to overlook the positive effects of migration on the health status of high income nations. It is not always the case that only unhealthy poor people migrate into these countries with a hope to improve their standard of living, very often highly qualified health professions form poorer countries migrate to these developed nations and fulfill the unmet need of skilled professionals in their health systems.
