Latent constraints for improved sustainable environmental health management in non‐industrialized countries

Abstract

Demographic, social, epidemiologic and political changes occur simultaneously with macroeconomic changes. In the health sector, for instance, the progress evident in health status in several nations seems to correspond globally with the number of people living below sustenance level, health and nutritional requirements in the past three decades. Increasing demand for services beyond the coping competence of many non‐industrialized governments have rendered the poverty‐ridden population helpless in the face of adversity. In several of the poorest nations, the structural adjustment programme with its attendant myopic targets and constricted economic centralization has intensified demand for changes at the social and political strata. The structural adjustment rate in all sectors of public services which would create a meaningful and realizable institutional change and economic benefit for both government and people has been seriously retarded in non‐industrialized countries, especially the poor ones, in contrast to the more prosperous countries.