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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Chronicles of Debt Crises Foretold
Anis Chowdhury and Jomo Kwame Sundaram, Originally published on Wiley Online Library, 5 Sept 2023. Also published on IDEAS Blog. / / The debt crises looming in developing countries are being exacerbated by changing debt composition. Declining net foreign exchange earnings have worsened their predicament. As concessional development finance declined, many governments turned to riskier…
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Health differentials associated with social inequality: description, explanation and strategy
The focus of this post is on the different uses of ‘social determinants’ and ‘social determination’ in describing, explaining and responding to the health differentials associated with social inequality. Background The level of health that a population can achieve is a function of their exposure to risk, their access to resources, and the distribution of…
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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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