Political Economy for Health Blog
Posts are by members of the Peoples Health Movement PEH Network. Anyone may comment but your first comment will be held for approval; after that you will have direct access.
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’).
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Promotion of inclusive and effective international tax cooperation at the United Nations
On 22 December 2023, the General Assembly adopted resolution 78/230, “Promotion of inclusive and effective international tax cooperation at the United Nations.” The resolution establishes an ad hoc intergovernmental Committee mandated to develop draft terms of reference for a United Nations framework convention on international tax cooperation, with a view to finalizing the Committee’s work by August…
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Trade disputes over IP and health
Thanks to KEI for sharing the following references on trade related bullying. Time-line of Disputes over Compulsory Licensing and Parallel Importation in South Africa, 1994 to 1999. http://www.cptech.org/ip/health/sa/sa-timeline.txt Susannah Markandya, Timeline of Trade Disputes involving Thailand and access to medicines, July 23, 2001 (Timeline entries from 1979 to 2001). http://www.cptech.org/ip/health/c/thailand/thailand.html Susannah Markandya, Timeline of disputes…
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The Collapse of Neoliberal Privatisation
By C P Chandreasekhar on IDEAs 19 April 2024 Thames Water, one of England’s many regional water monopolies, infamously privatised by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s and symbolising the dramatic turn in economic policy that neoliberalism implied, is finally collapsing. Unable to mobilise £500 million from shareholders who have milked the company over years, Kemble…
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Africa’s Debt Crisis needs a Political Fix, contend experts
By Meera Srinivasan, on IDEAs, 20 April 2024 Ghana’s women vendors and hawkers are hard to miss. Attired in bright colours and bold prints, they walk swiftly on capital Accra’s streets, bearing baskets with various items on their heads, as infants wrapped in cloth carriers sit clasping their shoulders. As key contributors to the country’s…
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Austerity, Dispossession and Injustice: Facets of the debt crisis in Sri Lanka
By Ahilan Kadirgamar on IDEAS, 26 April 2024 Sri Lanka defaulted on its external debt for the first time in its postcolonial history in April 2022. The International Monetary Fund (IMF)-led process of recovery that followed has not only been disastrous in terms of the economic policy package proposed by the Government. The underlying analysis…
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Finishing the Job of Global Tax Cooperation
By Jose Antonio Ocampo for Project Syndicate on 29 April 2024 Given the many loopholes and opportunities for tax arbitrage in today’s global economy, much closer international cooperation will be needed to ensure that multinational corporations and the world’s wealthiest people pay their fair share. Negotiations for this purpose are now underway, but developed countries…
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Dividends payments soar globally as worker pay stagnates
By Phillip Inman in the Guardian 1 May 2025 Shareholders have proved to be more successful at securing bumper payouts than workers have at winning higher pay, according to two studies that show dividends outstripping wages by a considerable margin in recent years. Oxfam said analysis of global data showed that dividend payments to shareholders over the…
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Corporate Medicine 2.0 — Special Purpose AcquisitionCompanies in the United States
By Nishant Uppal and Zirui Song, published in NEJM, 10 April 2024 Acquisitions of U.S. health care entities by private equity firms have come under scrutiny. But the back end of corporate acquisitions — the exit strategy — has remained largely ignored, despite arguably being more important in the long run. Private equity firms typically…
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Water Flowing Upwards: Net financial flows from developing countries
from C. P. Chandrasekhar and Jayati Ghosh on Real-World Economics Review blog, 1 May 2024, originally published in the Business Line on April 29, 2024 Once again, low and middle income countries (LMICs) are at the brutal receiving end of the fickle trajectory of international capital flows. As Figure 1 indicates, net financial flows to such countries, which…
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Mazzucato’s Mission economy: a moonshot guide to changing capitalism
Book Review by Mark Howard, published in Review of Radical Political Economics (22 April 2024). [Mariana Mazzucato served as chair of WHO’s Council on the Economics of Health for All. See Final Report (May 2023). Howard’s assessment of her approach to ‘changing capitalism’ is relevant to an appreciation of the report to WHO. – DGL]…
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