ABSTRACT
Only a short time ago the fundamental cause of declining death rates was considered to be economic development. The history of the West pointed to a direct influence of economic change on health; namely, the better diets arising from the gains in agriculture, transportation, and commerce during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But the essential point is that this case is not at all an isolated one, for there are other instances of spectacular declines in mortality. In order to avoid the effect of spectacular cases, this chapter discusses eighteen underdeveloped areas, chosen not because they had unusual declines in mortality but because they were representative of different areas and had fairly constant boundaries and a relatively continuous series of registered death statistics. The percentage change in average crude death rate was computed for each country. Then the percentages were added and divided by the number of countries involved in each comparison.
