Uploaded on 2017-06-19 by Madi Mukhametaliyev

I would like to discuss how different stock and flows affect the level of public health in a particular city, in my case, Almaty (biggest city of Kazakhstan). There are different stocks and flows that are involved in the process: city public spending, city and republican budget, roads and public transport infrastructure, number of travelling vehicles, wind and air, natural landscape. The stocks are static for a considerable period of time and hence less sensitive to changes in flows. Mountains, for example, surrounded Almaty forever, which is essential in how the wind and air flow through the city. Its heights are blocking the wind flowing southwards, which causes the air to stay above the city and accumulate CO2 produced by the city. This in turn increases pollution and deteriorates public health, e.g. by strengthening respiratory diseases. Other stocks are less static, but still relatively constant as compared with flows within a given timeframe. Number of vehicles coming moving to, within, and out of the city every day is of course more dynamic then its roads and public transport infrastructure (e.g. stock of buses and stations). The latter hence affects the former: roads can’t be build as fast to accommodate increase number of cars. However, eventually infrastructure can be adapted to the flows. The administration, for instance, is building a ring-road to redirect transit and freight transport around the city, and plans to build LRT public transport. These efforts in turn would help to decrease cars pollution and improve public health. Even more dynamic stock is the annual budget. City budget determines how much could be spent on public transport infrastructure. Public spending in this case is a flow, sourced from and constrained by the city budget. In case of LRT, the city does not have enough budget to subsidize the project. The instance depends on yearly revenues and expenditures of the city: next year, it may optimize costs or increase tax earnings to solve the constraint. Alternatively, the city might use its limit from the republican budget to implement the project. However, this ability the limit is static and cannot be overused: Almaty is no longer the capital of the country, and its status does not allow to borrow money beyond the certain limit. The interrelations between these stocks and flows help to structure our understanding of factors behind the public health in Almaty: identify which of those, on which phase, and within what timeframe, and potentially measure how much they can influence the stock of population health level.