Economic adjustment and the future of health services in the Third World

Hard economic times in the Third World in the 1980s found many countries unable to maintain previous levels of health and social services in the face of the mounting service cost of their external debt and declining export earnings. The economic adjustment policies promoted by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund on the basis of market ideology were not able alone to improve the economic status of the debtor countries and did have deleterious effects on their health services and the health status of their population. Less pressure to privatize health services, more aid from abroad for the public sector, and a reallocation of scarce government resources from military to social purposes would help to rectify the situation, although sustained long-run improvement would still depend on the external factors that determine economic prosperity, and the prognosis in this respect is uncertain.