Impact of the AIDS Crisis on South Africa's Prospects for Development

Download or read book Impact of the AIDS Crisis on South Africa's Prospects for Development written by Florian Seidl and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2007-09-27 with total page 29 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The association of the slow economic growth and development of a country on the one side, and the poor health of its people on the other side, is quite obvious. Formerly, the common sense was that low income in developing countries causes their bad condition concerning healthiness, but recent economic research increasingly considers the causal link between this two phenomena running the other way round. That is, poor health has a negative effect on per capita income, as it leads to lower labour productivity, lower investments in human capital and, by affecting the people's saving behaviour, in physical capital, and furthermore has an influence on the country's demography. The purpose of this paper is to identify the impact of the HIV/AIDS crisis on the South African economy and how this impact affects South Africa's economic growth and therefore its prospects for development. Economic impact "can be defined as that which causes the diversion of resources too uses that would not have been necessary in the absence of HIV/AIDS, and decreased production due to the disease". As this economic impact occurs through various channels, on different levels, it seems reasonable to approach the problem on these different levels, namely households, firms and business, and the macro economy."--p. 3.