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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Global South Stagnating under Heavier Debt Burden (Jomo Kwame Sundaram)
Much higher interest rates – due to Western central banks – are suffocating developing nations, especially the poorest, causing prolonged debt distress and economic stagnation. US Fed-induced stagnation After the greatest US Fed-led surge in international interest rates in more than four decades, developing countries spent $443.5 billion to service their external government and government-guaranteed debt in…
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Intellectual Property, tool of colonialism
Text originally published in Portuguese on Feb 27th 2024. The idea that white Europeans could go out and colonize the rest of the world was based on the premise that there was an enlightened humanity that needed to reach the darkened humanity, bringing it into this incredible light. This call to the heart of civilization…
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Farmers’ Protest in India Reignites: A Struggle for the Future of Food and Agriculture
Colin Todhunter in Dissident Voice, February 18th, 2024. // In 2021, after a year-long protest, India’s farmers brought about the repeal of three farm laws that were intended to ‘liberalise’ the agriculture sector. Now, in 2024, farmers are again protesting. The underlying issues and the facilitation of the neoliberal corporatisation of farming that sparked the…
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Decolonizing Post-Colonial Studies and Paradigms of Political Economy: Transmodernity, DecolonialThinking, and Global Coloniality
RAMÓN GROSFOGUEL, TRANSMODERNITY: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, 1(1), 2011 Can we produce a radical anti-systemic politics beyond identity politics?1 Is it possible to articulate a critical cosmopolitanism beyond nationalism and colonialism? Can we produce knowledges beyond Third World and Eurocentric fundamentalisms? Can we overcome the traditional dichotomy between political-economy and…
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Hyper-Imperialism: A Dangerous Decadent New Stage
Tricontinental, 23 January 2024 It has been a scant 30 years since the ‘end of history’ was declared by bourgeois ideologists in pantomimes of wish-fulfilment for sensing the inviolability of United States imperialism. For peoples’ struggles and movements feeling the boot of imperialism on their necks, no such end was in sight. In the face…
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Sick development: how rich-country governments and World Bank funding to for-profit hospitals causes harm, and why it should be stopped
Anna Marriot, Oxfam International, June 2023. Development finance institutions owned by European governments and the World Bank Group are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on expensive for-profit hospitals in the Global South that block patients from getting care, or bankrupt them, with some even imprisoning patients who cannot afford their bills. At the height…
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World Bank Enables Foreign Aid Theft
Jomo Kwame Sundaram, Jan 17 2024 (IPS) – World Bank aid encourages governments to enable illicit financial outflows to offshore tax havens by reducing capital controls, thus draining precious foreign exchange and government resources. Aiding elite wealthAid disbursements to highly aid-dependent countries coincide with sharp increases in bank deposits in offshore financial centres known for banking…
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Colombia takes significant next step to expand people’s access to affordable HIV treatment, and moves forward with compulsory license for HIV medicine dolutegravir
MSF Bogotá/Geneva, 6 February 2024 – On Friday, the government of Colombia took a historic step towards issuing its first-ever compulsory license (CL) to overcome patent barriers to HIV treatment and import less expensive generic versions of the HIV medicine dolutegravir without permission from the patent owner, ViiV Healthcare (a joint venture of GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer and Shionogi). The…
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Neocolonial ISDS, Abused, Biased, Costly, and Grossly Unfair
Jomo Kwame Sundaram, Feb 7 2024 (IPS) – 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. Developing country governments need to be much more wary of ISDS and its implications, and should urgently withdraw from existing commitments. They…
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Financialization Hypothesis: A Theoretical and Empirical Critique
Turan Subasat, Stavros Mavroudeas. Financialization Hypothesis: A Theoretical and Empirical Critique. World Review of Political Economy 2023 The financialization hypothesis (FH) is a popular leitmotiv which argues that the financial system conquers the commanding heights of the capitalist economy. It maintains that finance gained independence from productive-capital and began to dominate it. The FH bases…
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