Political and social determinants of life expectancy in less developed countries: a longitudinal study

BMC Public Health

Research Article

Lung-Chang Chien¹  Ro-Ting Lin²  Ya-Mei Chen²  Chang-Chuan Chan³ 

[1] Department of Internal Medicine, Division of Health Behavior Research, School of Medicine, Washington University in St. Louis, 4444 Forest Park Avenue, Suite 6700, 63108, St. Louis, USA;Institute of Occupational Medicine and Industrial Hygiene, College of Public Health, National Taiwan University, Room 722, No. 17, Xuzhou Road, 100, Taipei City, Taiwan;Institute of Occupational Medicine and Industrial Hygiene, College of Public Health, National Taiwan University, Room 722, No. 17, Xuzhou Road, 100, Taipei City, Taiwan;Global Health Center, College of Public Health, National Taiwan University, No. 17, Xuzhou Road, 100, Taipei City, Taiwan;

关键词: Life expectancy;    Socioeconomic factors;    Developing countries;    World health;    Political factors;    Public health;    Malnutrition;    Literacy;    Democracy;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1471-2458-12-85

 received in 2011-08-10, accepted in 2012-01-27,  发布年份 2012

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundThis study aimed to examine the longitudinal contributions of four political and socioeconomic factors to the increase in life expectancy in less developed countries (LDCs) between 1970 and 2004.MethodsWe collected 35 years of annual data for 119 LDCs on life expectancy at birth and on four key socioeconomic indicators: economy, measured by log10 gross domestic product per capita at purchasing power parity; educational environment, measured by the literacy rate of the adult population aged 15 years and over; nutritional status, measured by the proportion of undernourished people in the population; and political regime, measured by the regime score from the Polity IV database. Using linear mixed models, we analyzed the longitudinal effects of these multiple factors on life expectancy at birth with a lag of 0-10 years, adjusting for both time and regional correlations.ResultsThe LDCs' increases in life expectancy over time were associated with all four factors. Political regime had the least influence on increased life expectancy to begin with, but became significant starting in the 3rd year and continued to increase, while the impact of the other socioeconomic factors began strong but continually decreased over time. The combined effects of these four socioeconomic and political determinants contributed 54.74% - 98.16% of the life expectancy gains throughout the lag periods of 0-10 years.ConclusionsThough the effect of democratic politics on increasing life expectancy was relatively small in the short term when compared to the effects of the other socioeconomic factors, the long-term impact of democracy should not be underestimated.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Lin et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2012. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.