Income vs Life Expectancy and Access to Sanitation

Introduction:

Every year global development increases. As we become more advanced as a society, the technology we have becomes more advanced, as well as the access to these technologies increases. But inherently there are disparities between each income level of countries. How many countries are considered high income countries? What about low and middle income countries? Does this classification of income level have any effect on the population percentage of a country’s access to basic sanitation? Furthermore, how does the average life expectancy change, in relation to income level, and access to basic sanitation. This short post aims to explore how; High, Middle, and Low income countries (HIC, MIC, LIC) compare with each other when focusing on life expectancy, and access to sanitation.

Data:

With data going back to 1960, the World Bank Group has produced a massive data base on World Development indicators. With this database, I am able to access data from all countries around the world. For this post, I will be focusing on data from 2000–2020, looking at all 195 countries. I extracted a large CSV file, with different series selected. I ultimately decided to focus on each country’s life expectancy, as well as access to sanitation. This selection of data will allow me to critically analyze how income level changes the country’s access to sanitation, and how both of these are related to life expectancy.

Country Income vs Sanitation and Life Expectancy :

General trends:

Over the last 2 decades it is apparent that the Earth as a collective has seen a steady increase in development. Both ‘Access to Sanitation’ and ‘Life Expectancy” have been subject to a stable increase since 2000. With no backwards progress, it is easy to see how as a collective, society is generally advancing in the right way. We can then break this data down into income levels.

To start, let’s plot an average of all high income countries’ access to sanitation, as well as life expectancy. To little surprise here, the HIC’s don’t show much change. With a range from 98.83% to 99.44%, the percentage of the population of these countries have maintained nearly 100% access to sanitation. Life expectancy also increases, but barely. In 2000, HIC’s had an average life expectancy of 77, but this number only slightly grew to 80. Although both of these variables only slightly increased, this is still an increase.

Moving on, we come to middle income countries. Here we see some dramatic changes in the access to sanitation variable. Growing from 48.34% in 2000, all the way to 79.13% in 2020. With this range of 30% in access to sanitation, we can see the correlation between life expectancy and access to sanitation in the MIC plot, with life expectancy increasing 66 to 72.

Finally, I plotted low income countries as well. This plot is quite unique from the other two. Here we can see that life expectancy is actually increasing at the same rate as access to sanitation. Going from 53 to 63, LIC’s see a 10 year increase in life expectancy, while access to sanitation only increases from 19% to 29%.

Conclusion:

After visually plotting the different income levels, it is easy to see that there is a disparity between the income level of countries. There are some big differences between countries, primarily in access to sanitation. Here we can see that low income countries are still struggling to maintain a linear growth in access to sanitation. This was unexpected, as I had dangerously assumed that all growth would have to be linear, just off the world dataframe (fig 1). I find the middle income countries’ plot to be the most interesting. Here we can see that MIC’s are rapidly increasing their health by making sanitation more accessible. This makes the growth of life expectancy among these countries interesting, as it is a relatively steady increase. Lastly, the high income countries boast no surprises. They start at an already super high percentage with access to sanitation, and steadily increase life expectancy. There are significant differences in how income level affects life expectancy, and access to sanitation. After this short analysis, it is obvious that countries with more money will enjoy better health. I plan to expand upon this preliminary research and add more variables into the equation, like co2 emissions, and access to drinking water.

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