Healthcare's Contribution to Angola's Economic Growth and Development

Francesco Argentina
James Quillin
IB Economics 
February 4, 2020
How does Healthcare & Education affect Economic Development and Growth in Angola?

This essay will explain how the domestic factor of healthcare affects the economic growth and development of Angola. Angola has healthcare in both the public and private sector of their economy giving citizens access to free healthcare if they need it, but also the chance to have better quality care if they can afford it. Even though Angola’s healthcare may be free, it is considered very low quality according to Allianz Care[1]. The public healthcare system is incredibly underfunded and often times can not efficiently treat the prevalent health hazards of Angola such as HIV/AIDS, malaria and neonatal disorders. Even if you are wealthy enough to afford private care, more often than not a person will travel to nearby South Africa or Nambia to receive complicated procedures. This is incredibly detrimental to economic growth, as rich citizens are taking their money outside of the Angolan economy and placing it in a neighboring one instead. This halts the growth of the private healthcare sector and leaves more citizens to rely on the public one that is underfunded. With the majority of citizens not being able to afford good care this leads to the spread of diseases which diminishes the ability of the workforce to work and contribute to the economy. Additionally when people are sick, their well being is likely to drop as well which decreases development. From the IB textbook, we learned that an indicator of economic development is life expectancy which is obviously closely related to quality of healthcare[2]. With healthcare quality so low, this results in a life expectancy of Angola to be 60 years which is not a number assigned to developed countries. A statistic that I found interesting was that Angola has a mortality rate of 48.8% attributed to unsafe water, unsafe sanitation and lack of hygiene, demonstrating that the standard living conditions are far too harsh for Angola’s healthcare to compete with[3]. 



Works Cited 
[1]“Healthcare in Angola” Allianzcare.com, Allianz Care
www.allianzcare.com/en/support/health-and-wellness/national-healthcare-systems/healthcare-in-angola.html.
[2]Blink, Jocelyn, and Ian Dorton. Economics: Course Companion. Oxford University Press, 2012.
[3]“Mortality rate attributed to unsafe water, unsafe sanitation and lack of hygiene (per

100,000 population)” World Bank: Data, The World Bank https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.STA.WASH.P5

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