The true price of failing to help the world’s disabled
WHO and World Bank figures suggest it costs between US$1.37t and US$1.94t to ensure the world’s disabled can be part of society. But is that just the tip of the iceberg?
Hanoi’s National Convention Centre, sepulchral host to the second APEC Senior Officials’ cluster in Vietnam’s APEC chairmanship year, feels an improbable place for a discussion on the high price we pay for treating our disabled people like pariahs.
Much more appropriate the squalid teeming streets of Hanoi’s old quarter, where people with a multitude of daunting disabilities hawk their wares, hawk their services, on locals and tourists alike, determined to make a living against all the odds. Such a contrast with the manicured lawns, lakes and villas around the grand, sepulchral Convention Centre.
The discussion on disability – driven by the United States – provided a valuable next step in APEC’s three-year examination of the social and economic price we pay across the region for paying inadequate attention to “inclusion”.
In the past, valuable work has been done – again, mainly driven by American colleagues – on the economic cost of discrimination against women, on the business cost of poor health among employees, and the distinctive problems being faced by the region’s youth. Work has also been done on the cost of treating mental ill health.
This exploration of the opportunity costs of failing to capture the surprising and sometimes counter-intuitive contributions that can be made by people with disability is clearly linked to these other discriminations, and is a valuable complement to these past projects.
In Hong Kong, for example, about 40 per cent of our disabled have full-time carers, and 80 per cent of these carers are spouses, sons and daughters or their spouses, or parents
The symposium was launched with some explosive numbers: according to a 2011 study by the World Health Organisation and the World Bank, about 15 per cent of the world’s population lives with some form of disability. That’s over a billion people.