FROM ECONOMICS TO HEALTH

The followings are some quotes of the talk by Professor Ikemoto (University of Tokyo, Japan) on October 10 2007, at Hall D101:

"I have been working on poverty in Vietnam for more than ten years. At the beginning, I focused on income aspect of poverty as most economists do. But a few years later, when I visited “poor villages” of ethnic minority people in the Central Highland, I found that income approach may rather deteriorate the quality of life (QOL) because their cultural life is not appropriately taken into consideration. Diversified cultural and environmental conditions require diversified approach. However, we need an integrated evaluational space, for which Amartya Sen proposed his capability approach."

"Then I tried to apply the capability approach for poverty analysis. This is now widely applied as the human development approach. An important factor of the human capability is health. Income is not our ends of life but just a means to achieve healthy happy life. During the past two weeks, I have measured blood pressure for nearly 400 villagers. I found that we can say with such data much more than we imagine about poverty and QOL of poor people."

Recent news

Same category