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Households, health and crises: Coping with economic upheaval in Jordan, 1988–1991
Author(s) -
Dejong Jocelyn
Publication year - 1995
Publication title -
journal of international development
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.533
H-Index - 66
eISSN - 1099-1328
pISSN - 0954-1748
DOI - 10.1002/jid.3380070308
Subject(s) - poverty , development economics , economic growth , coping (psychology) , health care , refugee , baseline (sea) , sustainability , socioeconomics , political science , economics , medicine , ecology , psychiatry , law , biology
Drawing on baseline data from an urban development project which provided services and legal land tenure to Palestinian refugee‐squatters in five low‐income areas of Amman, Jordan, this article analyses the impact of economic crisis, structural adjustment and the Gulf War on two out of five of the upgraded communities. A study was conducted in 1991, following the Gulf crisis, to analyse the sustainability of child health improvements that had been achieved during the first five years of the upgrading project and to examine the relationships between poverty and health. It was found that several health indicators had deteriorated since 1985 (which was before the economic crisis which had begun in 1988), but that households used a number of strategies to alleviate the growing income constraints on access to health care and basic goods. Despite a sophisticated health care system, there were few institutionalized mechanisms to generate policy‐relevant data which might have led to action to protect the poor from the negative effects of the economic crises.