Green Mark A
1 Department of Geography & Planning, University of Liverpool, UK.
Scand J Public Health. 2018 Feb;46(1):38-41. doi: 10.1177/1403494817726616. Epub 2017 Aug 26.
The Great Recession of 2007-2008 saw the largest period of economic downturn since the Second World War or the Great Depression of the 1930s. Recessions, however, tend not to have a significant impact on population health. Rather it is how society and governments respond to a recession that has a larger impact on their populations. The dominant political response to the Great Recession was the introduction of austerity programmes aimed at reducing the size of the state. In this Commentary, I briefly review the state of evidence on the changes in population health during austerity. Although the negative impact of austerity on overall population health has been well documented across Europe, there remains a paucity of evidence on within-country differences in health. The slowing down of improvements in life expectancy, correlated to the level of austerity, raises uncomfortable questions as to whether we are beginning to transition from the era of consistently improving population health to a new age characterised by an instability in population health largely dictated by the social and political determinants of health.
2007 - 2008年的大衰退是自第二次世界大战或20世纪30年代大萧条以来最长的经济低迷期。然而，经济衰退往往对人口健康没有重大影响。相反，社会和政府应对衰退的方式对其人口的影响更大。对大衰退的主要政治反应是推出旨在缩减政府规模的紧缩计划。在本评论中，我简要回顾了有关紧缩时期人口健康变化的证据状况。尽管紧缩对欧洲总体人口健康的负面影响已有充分记录，但关于国内健康差异的证据仍然匮乏。预期寿命改善速度放缓，与紧缩程度相关，这引发了一些令人不安的问题，即我们是否正开始从人口健康持续改善的时代过渡到一个以人口健康不稳定为特征的新时代，而这种不稳定很大程度上由健康的社会和政治决定因素所主导。
