| Kippreport.com

The health challenge in emerging market cities

April 4, 2011 10:05 by Arab News

Emerging markets – Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Russia, Turkey, and some 15 other countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America – account for a rapidly growing share of the world’s population and economy.
But their governments now face one of the major challenges of the 21st century: Creating public-health solutions that match the speed and scale of urbanisation.
The four largest emerging markets account for more than 40 percent of the world’s population and have a collective GDP of nearly $9 trillion. It is expected that their economies will overtake those of the G7 by 2030, and that, by 2050, Brazil, China, India, Mexico, and Russia will, with the US, be the world’s dominant economies.
Today, however, these countries’ cities must contend with economic and social issues that are more acute, more urgent, and of a vastly larger scale than those that confronted European and American cities in the 19th and 20th centuries.
A principal challenge is managing the consequences of the explosive growth of urban populations. More than half of the world’s population now lives in cities. In my own country, Pakistan, Karachi is growing at a rate of 1,000 people per day.

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Tags: Brazil, China, emerging markets, Health, Healthcare, Middle East, UAE