Integrating Health in Impact Assessment: opportunities for Health Promotion post 2015

IAIA members together with WHO Europe and the European Public Health Association (EUPHA) have conducted a research about “Health Inclusion in Impact Assessment”. The preliminary findings were presented in Calgary at IAIA2013 to other Impact Assessment practitioners. This joint discussion further refined the papers, the overall conclusions, and recommendations on the way forward. The final publication will be available on all Institutions websites in the coming months. In the mean time we present a poster at the 8th European Congress on Tropical Medicine and International Health, starting next week in Copenhagen. The poster focuses on the role that Impact Assessment can play in the post 2015 agenda. This is a crucial time when new global sustainable goals are under scrutiny and discussion. The Final Report of the Global Thematic Consultation on Health states that “Health is central to sustainable development: health is a beneficiary of development, a contributor to development, and a key indicator of what people-centred, rights-based, inclusive, and equitable development seeks to achieve.” In this new post 2015 development framework the contributions of other sectors to health and wellbeing are clearly articulated. Impact Assessment is the existing and widely accepted process which can be applied to all sectoral policies, programs, and projects in order to secure health, minimize health risks, and maximize health opportunities.

Inequality, Trust and Sustainability

Really interesting paper, there's quite a bit of quantitative modelling in it. See my take home point below and the interesting figure on page 3 shown poorly below.

Click here to download it.

Abstract
Instrumental arguments linking inequality to sustainability often suppose a negative relationship between inequality and social cohesion, and empirical studies of inequality and social trust support the assumption. If true, then redistribution should increase levels of social cohesion and thereby ease the implementation of policies that require collective action to achieve shared benefits.

An examination of the data by the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) suggests that at least part of the relationship may be explained by income level, rather than income distribution, suggesting that growth, rather than redistribution, may achieve the same goal.

This paper tests for the possibility and suggests that income is indeed important in explaining differences in levels of social trust. However, the effect of income level is insufficient to explain all of the dependence on income inequality; both income level and income distribution are correlated with social trust. The analysis is done at the income decile level using individual response data from the World Values Survey.

While the analysis is limited by the availability and reliability of the underlying data, the results suggest that neither redistribution nor growth alone is sufficient to raise a low-trust country to a position of medium or high trust. Rather, using the parameters estimated in this paper, a combination of growth with narrowing income distributions could, over a period of perhaps two decades, produce a significant change in levels of social trust.


My take home point from the conclusion:
This analysis support the supposition; inequality matters for social trust. The level of income also matters, but growth by itself appears insufficient. A policy of “broad-based” growth that leaves income distributions unchanged will not effectively move a low-trust society to a medium-trust society, much less to a high-trust society. Perhaps for high-income countries, but certainly for currently low-income countries, the results suggest that a combination of growth with increasing equality is more effective for improving levels of social trust than either growth or redistribution alone.

Source: Inequality, Trust, and Sustainability, Eric Kemp-Benedict, Stockholm Environment Institute, Working Paper No. 2011-01