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’).
-
AFTINET briefing paper on ISDS
Australian Fair Trade and Investment (AFTINET) updated briefing paper on Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS), January 2024 AFTINET has produced an updated briefing paper on ISDS. It provides background and the latest evidence on ISDS cases including Clive Palmer’s three cases against the Australian government, which total nearly $410 billion. It documents other case studies and…
-
Neocolonial ISDS, Abused, Biased, Costly, and Grossly Unfair
By Jomo Kwame Sundaram in Inter Press Service, 7 Feb 2024 Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) provisions in international trade and investment agreements – long abused by opportunists with means – are slowly being rejected by cautious governments. Jomo Kwame SundaramDeveloping country governments need to be much more wary of ISDS and its implications, and should…
-
What the GDP Hides
From Prabhat Patnaik, in People’s Democracy, 4 Feb 2024 THERE are well-known problems associated with the concept of gross domestic product as well as with its measurement. The inclusion of the service sector within GDP is something that Adam Smith would have objected to on the conceptual grounds that those employed in this sector constituted…
-
Corporate greed and rich countries cowardice lead WTO to abandon proposed sharing of Covid treatment technologies
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Last night, news broke that the World Trade Organization (WTO) is preparing to reject a proposal that would have relaxed pharmaceutical monopolies and supported global sharing of COVID-19 therapeutic and diagnostic technologies. In response, Global Trade Watch director Melinda St. Louis issued the following statement: “In a pandemic, among the most precious…
-
Global Tax Evasion Report 2024
This report produced by the European Tax Observatory (and authored by Annette Alstadsæter, Sarah Godar, Panayiotis Nicolaides, and Gabriel Zucman) reviews the various initiatives launched over the last 10 years to reduce international tax evasion. Yet despite the importance of these developments, little is known about the effects of these new policies. Is global tax evasion…
-
The Middle East and North Africa Gap: Prosperity for the rich, austerity for the rest
This Oxfam briefing paper (by Alexandros Kentikelenis, SaharMechmech, Amine Bouzaiene, Rowaida Moshrif, and Nabil Abdo, October 2023) examines growing inequality in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, focusing on Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco and Tunisia in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic and the cost of living crisis. It examines the lack of adequate…
-
Settler Colonialism under a Shroud of Victimhood
Analysis by Prabhat Patnaik, 20 November 2023, published originally in People’s Democracy and re-posted in the IDEAS Blog. /// The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had witnessed the emergence of two different paradigms of colonialism: the first, of which India was the classic example, involved the conquest of countries which had had a history of established…
-
When economists shut off your water
Research report by Adrian Wilson, Irene Nduta, and Somo Abdi; published on Africasacountry.com in November 2023, based on research conducted in 2022. /// Access to water in Nairobi is horribly unequal. The World Bank, Nairobi Water Company, and development economists exploited this unjust context to treat poor Kenyans like guinea pigs. In August 2020, people…
-
Constructing an economics consistent with the biophysical limits to economic growth?
In this special issue of the Real-world Economics Review a collection of heterodox economists respond to the following invitation: For over a century economics has loosely guided the global economy’s national economies. Natural science tells us that the climate crisis has been both caused by the global economy and ultimately threatens its continuing existence. Because…
-
Implications for developing countries/LDCs of the JSI E-commerce text (Revision 5)
By Jane Kelsey December 2023; published on bilaterals.org. /// Developing countries and least developed countries (LDCs) facegrowing pressure to participate in and adopt the outcomes ofplurilateral negotiations on electronic commerce, known as theElectronic Commerce Joint Statement Initiative (JSI), that are beingconducted by a sub-group of WTO Members outside the WTO’smandated procedures and bodies. As the…
Subscribe to updates
Stay in the loop with everything you need to know.