Objective
After the collapse of Communism 3 to 7 million ¿excess deaths¿ occurred, comparable to the toll exacted by Stalin. While public health research has uncovered a great deal about the proximal causes of these deaths, identifying alcohol and psychosocial stress as key causes, incredibly few studies have attempted to address the variation in these proximal causes. Why did people in some countries start to abuse alcohol much more and experience greater stress than in others? A recent article in The Lancet by the PI linked radical privatization policies to increased mortality via increased unemployment using longitudinal cross-national statistics. This article generated great controversy, and soon a critics claimed that with different specifications the model was not sufficiently robust, or that the cross-national data could conceal an ecological fallacy or miss another cause. Our study will provide decisive evidence on this debate by proposing a new methodology for studying the impact of economic policies on public health, and in so doing advancing an emerging new research tradition we call the Political Economy of Public Health. We will do this by way of developing an innovative methodology of establishing a convenience cohort study, based on the Brass indirect method traditionally used by demographers in countries without reliable vital registration data. The Brass method uses interviews with random population samples to collect data on deaths of their relatives to estimate key population mortality parameters. Our innovation is to select one-company towns that were privatized in a radical way, and matching them with towns which had a different privatization experience. In this way we can generate micro-data to test the privatization thesis. We will also be able to measure the importance of occupation on mortality. This new research method promises new tools to study the impact of large-scale politicaal, economic and organizational change on population health.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- medical and health scienceshealth sciencespublic health
- social sciencessociologydemographymortality
- natural scienceschemical sciencesorganic chemistryalcohols
- social sciencessociologysocial issuesunemployment
- social scienceseconomics and businesseconomicspolitical economy
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Call for proposal
ERC-2010-AdG_20100317
See other projects for this call
Funding Scheme
ERC-AG - ERC Advanced GrantHost institution
CB2 1TN Cambridge
United Kingdom