The sustainable health agenda in the Americas: pre-pandemic gaps and 2030 estimates of the sdgs indicators

• Autor(a) principal: Fabrício Silveira
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Outros Autores: Luísa da Matta Machado Fernandes, Rômulo Paes-Sousa
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Institucional da UFMG
• Texto Completo: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0270301; http://hdl.handle.net/1843/59817
• topic: COVID-19 impact; Sustainable Development Goals; Pandemic; COVID-19; Impactos econômicos

The preliminary assessments of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic have recently rekin dled worries about the feasibility of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Notwith standing the concern voiced by key academic and political actors, the actual evidence on the current gaps and distance from the goals is still very much unknown. This study esti mates the global evolution curves for each health-related SDGs indicator in the World Health Organization’s SDGs platform. These curves synthesize the transnational trends at play in the evolution of each health-related topic, offering an average global counterfactual to compare with the actual information for each country. The empirical investigation focuses on the American continent, highlighting the health gaps before the COVID-19 outbreak in 33 countries of the region. The study also extrapolates these trends to predict the evolution of the health-related SDGs in each of these countries over the next decade using as the base line scenario the International Monetary Fund’s economic forecasts. The results show a wid ening gap in the region, associated with the differential economic capacity of these countries. Some bottlenecks are shared by most countries in the continent, especially in the themes of violence and infectious diseases. The latter is likely to improve faster than other health themes in the next decade, whereas improvements in the theme non-communicable diseases can be more challenging. The findings provide much needed comparative evi dence to guide the countries in the region to set priorities and concentrate efforts to acceler ate progress in the health-related SDGs.