Political Economy for Health Blog
Posts are by members of the Peoples Health Movement PEH Network. Anyone may comment but you will need to register before your first comment will be published.
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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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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Looming debt crisis, deepening inequality, lack of investment in climate mitigation and adaptation: UN Trade and Development calls for structural reform
Globally, in the first quarter of 2024, economic growth is slowing; private investment is stagnant, income inequality is increasing; and consumption expenditure is increasingly sustained by private borrowing. The UN Trade and Development Report Update (April, 2024) is a ‘must read’ for understanding the structure and direction of the global economy. Higher interest rates in…
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Capitalism is the single greatest source of violence
By Jason Hickel, from Pearls and Irritations, 23 April 2024 What the present moment reveals, once again, is that Western aggression during the “Cold War” was never about destroying socialism, as such. It was about destroying movements and governments in the periphery that sought economic sovereignty. Why? Because economic sovereignty in the periphery threatens capital accumulation…
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