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The Case: Skolnikland Is in South Asia. It Has About 30 Million

question 61

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The Case:
Skolnikland is in South Asia. It has about 30 million people. The country has a plains region, a hill region, and a region with high mountains. It has a number of ecosystems. The plains are dry for much of the year, there is some rainforest, and the rest of the country goes from hills to high mountains. There are two seasons of heavy rainfall, which mostly affect the plains.
The people come from many ethnic groups that tend to live in their own regions and each speaks their own language. The ethnic groups largely follow one of three different religions. The large cities are mixed ethnically. One ethnic group is economically and socially very dominant. The national language is the language of the ethnic group that is dominant.
Skolnikland is a low-income country by World Bank criteria, with a per capita income of about $850. The economy has been growing at about 5 percent per year on average over the last decade, but had very slow economic growth in the three decades prior to that. About 70 percent of the people live in rural areas and 30 percent live in urban areas. The number of people living in urban areas has been growing recently at an increasing pace. The richest 10 percent of the population controls 90 percent of total income. Sixty-five percent of the population is officially categorized as living "below poverty line."
The total fertility rate is about 2.2, and it has been declining at a steady pace over the past three decades, from just over 5.0. Contraceptive prevalence is high and fertility low for a low-income country. There are an almost equal number of men and women in the population, although men play a dominant role in society. Infant mortality is 30 per 1,000 live births. Maternal mortality is about 260 per 100,000 live births. Twenty-five percent of the children under-five years of age are moderately underweight for age. Ten percent are stunted.
Most people earn their livelihood in agriculture but there are also a number of service industries, small and large. Other export industries are beginning to grow in number, mostly focused on the export of commodities to China.
The adult literacy rate is about 80 percent. The educational enrollment rate, especially for girls at the primary and secondary levels, has been growing steadily and most recently at an increasing pace to the point where almost all children are in school. The quality of schooling, however, leaves much to be desired. Only about 60 percent of the people have access to safe water. Only about 40% have access to sanitary disposal of human waste.
HIV prevalence is less than 0.5 percent of the adult population. The number of new HIV cases stabilized over the last few years. There has been some progress in getting people on ART, but only about 50 percent of those clinically eligible are already on treatment. Malaria is common in the plains, but it is still largely caused by P. vivax and is not associated with many deaths. Skolnikland is one of the 22 countries most affected by TB, according to WHO.
Investments in the road system have been growing slowly, but the use of private automobiles has recently begun to increase more rapidly, from a very low base.
Skolnikland has a mixed health system that is made up of public institutions and publicly financed providers, licensed private providers, unlicensed medical practitioners, and traditional healers, among others. NGOs are also very actively involved in the health sector. There is no health insurance, except for some free services for the poor in the few publicly financed hospitals, to which the better off people do not go. Lacking faith in many public providers, a large share of the poor use private sector health services. Except for a few public and private centers of excellence, the health system is not very effective or efficient and is largely of mixed quality. However, despite this, the country has been very effective in its programs for family planning, vitamin A, TB, and blindness control.
-The healthiest age range for a woman to bear her first child in Skolnikland is:

Definitions:

Reliable Way

A reliable way refers to a method or approach that consistently produces accurate, trustworthy, or dependable results.

Premonitions of Disaster

A strong feeling of anxiety or anticipation that something bad or catastrophic is going to happen, without logical reasoning.

Hindsight Bias

A cognitive bias where people overestimate their ability to have predicted an outcome that could not possibly have been predicted.

Illusory Correlations

The mental tendency to assume a connection between two factors even if there is none.