Political Economy for Health Blog



This blogsite is a resource of the People’s Health Movement. Its purpose is to provide a platform for discussion of the applications of political economy to the struggle for health. (The People’s Charter for Health provides an overview of PHM’s analyses and objectives: the ‘struggle for health’).


  • Class

    Usage The term ‘class’ is used for widely different purposes. Researchers whose purpose is primarily descriptive (eg demographers or statisticians) tend to treat ‘class’ as a descriptive variable, often closely linked to household income or wealth. A spectrum from very rich to very poor is defined and the numbers and circumstances of households at different…

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  • Alienation

    Usage This post explores the usefulness of alienation theory in bridging between the insights of political economy and the concerns of public health (Crinson and Yuill 2008). Alienation is not a real thing, out there; it is a conceptual framework for making sense of human experience. The term comes to contemporary usage from Roman law…

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  • Neoliberalism

    Usages The term, ‘neoliberalism’, is required to carry a wide range of meanings; variously an ideological project, a political program, or an institutional configuration of governance (England and Ward 2007) Bell and Green (2016) comment that “When a concept can be used to describe such an extraordinary – and even downright contradictory – array of…

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