CAMBRIDGE: One great challenge facing humanity is reducing the huge gaps in income and wealth between the world’s haves and have nots. Globalization by itself is not doing the job. Now, Dr. Gro Bruntland, the head of the World Health Organization, has taken up the challenge. She points to the desperate health conditions of the world’s poor as one of the greatest barriers to economic development, and is mobilizing the world community to do something about it.
In mid-January, Dr. Bruntland appointed a new global Commission on Macroeconomics and Health (CMH), and honored me by appointing me as its Chairman. The Commission’s task is enormous, but easily described: to help put global public health at the center of a new strategy of global economic development. The Commission will meet in various parts of the world – Asia, Africa, Latin America, Europe – in the coming two years, and will issue its report and recommendations at the end of 2001.
Market reforms by themselves cannot lift a population from poverty if people are simultaneously struggling with epidemics of AIDS, or malaria, or tuberculosis, or chronic malnutrition, or other crippling health problems. Populations battling with disease lack the energy, productivity, or means to invest in their own future. Studies show that when life expectancy is low, so too are many kinds of investments in the future, such as school attendance, personal saving by households, and foreign investments.
Throughout modern history, improvements in public health have speeded economic development. It was Britain’s rising agricultural productivity in the 18th century, for example, which helped to raise nutrition levels and reduce the burden of infectious diseases, that helped to initiate the Industrial Revolution. It was U.S. investment in eradicating hookworms from its Southern states in the early 20th century that improved health conditions in the American South, and which helped to bring about a boom in investments in that previously impoverished region.
Similarly, eradication of malaria in Spain, Italy, and Greece in the late 1940s (using household spraying of pesticides among other factors) helped bring a boom in tourism and foreign investment to these countries in the 1950s and 1960s. That boom enabled Southern Europe to begin to narrow the large gap in income with the richer countries of Northern Europe.
Health conditions in many of the poorest countries in the world are shockingly bad, and in some cases getting worse. Approximately one-third of children in the poorest countries are malnourished, and thereby at risk of much greater incidence of infectious disease, learning disorders, and other maladies. Life expectancy is little more than 50 years (compared with around 77 years in the rich countries). Millions of poor people every year die of infectious diseases, such as malaria, tuberculosis, pneumonia, and measles.
Access every new PS commentary, our entire On Point suite of subscriber-exclusive content – including Longer Reads, Insider Interviews, Big Picture/Big Question, and Say More – and the full PS archive.
Subscribe Now
Ironically, many deaths would be preventable by existing vaccines (such as for measles), but the populations are often too poor to have access to even basic public health. Even in many middle-income and higher-income countries, there have been surges of new and re-emerging infectious diseases, as a result of increased global travel, the opening of new regions to settlement, and the overuse of antibiotics with a resulting spread of disease-resistant parasites.
The Commission will address these desperate conditions by:
mobilizing evidence showing how poor health contributes directly to failed economic development;
working with professionals at the World Health Organization, UNICEF, the World Bank, the Gates Foundation, and other organizations, to identify public health interventions, such as greater vaccine coverage, that have a very high economic rate of return as well as a high health benefit;
working with the pharmaceutical sector and non-governmental organizations to find creative new ways to get essential medicines to the poorest peoples;
helping to devise new ways to re-direct global research and development efforts to unsolved problems, such as an effective vaccine for AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, and dysentery;
exploring ways to increase overall public spending on vital health needs, by mobilizing more international aid, by expanding the depth of debt relief for highly indebted poor countries, and by finding ways that poor countries can increase their own financial efforts.
The Commission will look for inputs from concerned citizens, public health experts, governments, and non-governmental groups from all parts of the world. One of the crucial purposes of the Commission is to help give voice to the health needs of the poorest of the poor. Therefore, the Commission will be seeking inputs in advice and research from all parts of the world, and will provide a record of its evidence gathering and deliberations on the internet.
At a time when global science is more dynamic than ever; when the richest countries are experiencing a boom in wealth unrivaled in history (including around $8 trillion in stock market gains in the United States in the past four years!), the world yearns for more effective approaches to the struggle against poverty. The World Health Organization is taking its place at the center of that effort.
To have unlimited access to our content including in-depth commentaries, book reviews, exclusive interviews, PS OnPoint and PS The Big Picture, please subscribe
Iran’s mass ballistic missile and drone attack on Israel last week raised anew the specter of a widening Middle East war that draws in Iran and its proxies, as well as Western countries like the United States. The urgent need to defuse tensions – starting by ending Israel’s war in Gaza and pursuing a lasting political solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – is obvious, but can it be done?
The most successful development stories almost always involve major shifts in the sources of economic growth, which in turn allow economies to reinvent themselves out of necessity or by design. In China, the interplay of mounting external pressures, lagging household consumption, and falling productivity will increasingly shape China’s policy choices in the years ahead.
explains why the Chinese authorities should switch to a consumption- and productivity-led growth model.
Designing a progressive anti-violence strategy that delivers the safety for which a huge share of Latin Americans crave is perhaps the most difficult challenge facing many of the region’s governments. But it is also the most important.
urge the region’s progressives to start treating security as an essential component of social protection.
CAMBRIDGE: One great challenge facing humanity is reducing the huge gaps in income and wealth between the world’s haves and have nots. Globalization by itself is not doing the job. Now, Dr. Gro Bruntland, the head of the World Health Organization, has taken up the challenge. She points to the desperate health conditions of the world’s poor as one of the greatest barriers to economic development, and is mobilizing the world community to do something about it.
In mid-January, Dr. Bruntland appointed a new global Commission on Macroeconomics and Health (CMH), and honored me by appointing me as its Chairman. The Commission’s task is enormous, but easily described: to help put global public health at the center of a new strategy of global economic development. The Commission will meet in various parts of the world – Asia, Africa, Latin America, Europe – in the coming two years, and will issue its report and recommendations at the end of 2001.
Market reforms by themselves cannot lift a population from poverty if people are simultaneously struggling with epidemics of AIDS, or malaria, or tuberculosis, or chronic malnutrition, or other crippling health problems. Populations battling with disease lack the energy, productivity, or means to invest in their own future. Studies show that when life expectancy is low, so too are many kinds of investments in the future, such as school attendance, personal saving by households, and foreign investments.
Throughout modern history, improvements in public health have speeded economic development. It was Britain’s rising agricultural productivity in the 18th century, for example, which helped to raise nutrition levels and reduce the burden of infectious diseases, that helped to initiate the Industrial Revolution. It was U.S. investment in eradicating hookworms from its Southern states in the early 20th century that improved health conditions in the American South, and which helped to bring about a boom in investments in that previously impoverished region.
Similarly, eradication of malaria in Spain, Italy, and Greece in the late 1940s (using household spraying of pesticides among other factors) helped bring a boom in tourism and foreign investment to these countries in the 1950s and 1960s. That boom enabled Southern Europe to begin to narrow the large gap in income with the richer countries of Northern Europe.
Health conditions in many of the poorest countries in the world are shockingly bad, and in some cases getting worse. Approximately one-third of children in the poorest countries are malnourished, and thereby at risk of much greater incidence of infectious disease, learning disorders, and other maladies. Life expectancy is little more than 50 years (compared with around 77 years in the rich countries). Millions of poor people every year die of infectious diseases, such as malaria, tuberculosis, pneumonia, and measles.
Subscribe to PS Digital
Access every new PS commentary, our entire On Point suite of subscriber-exclusive content – including Longer Reads, Insider Interviews, Big Picture/Big Question, and Say More – and the full PS archive.
Subscribe Now
Ironically, many deaths would be preventable by existing vaccines (such as for measles), but the populations are often too poor to have access to even basic public health. Even in many middle-income and higher-income countries, there have been surges of new and re-emerging infectious diseases, as a result of increased global travel, the opening of new regions to settlement, and the overuse of antibiotics with a resulting spread of disease-resistant parasites.
The Commission will address these desperate conditions by:
mobilizing evidence showing how poor health contributes directly to failed economic development;
working with professionals at the World Health Organization, UNICEF, the World Bank, the Gates Foundation, and other organizations, to identify public health interventions, such as greater vaccine coverage, that have a very high economic rate of return as well as a high health benefit;
working with the pharmaceutical sector and non-governmental organizations to find creative new ways to get essential medicines to the poorest peoples;
helping to devise new ways to re-direct global research and development efforts to unsolved problems, such as an effective vaccine for AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, and dysentery;
exploring ways to increase overall public spending on vital health needs, by mobilizing more international aid, by expanding the depth of debt relief for highly indebted poor countries, and by finding ways that poor countries can increase their own financial efforts.
The Commission will look for inputs from concerned citizens, public health experts, governments, and non-governmental groups from all parts of the world. One of the crucial purposes of the Commission is to help give voice to the health needs of the poorest of the poor. Therefore, the Commission will be seeking inputs in advice and research from all parts of the world, and will provide a record of its evidence gathering and deliberations on the internet.
At a time when global science is more dynamic than ever; when the richest countries are experiencing a boom in wealth unrivaled in history (including around $8 trillion in stock market gains in the United States in the past four years!), the world yearns for more effective approaches to the struggle against poverty. The World Health Organization is taking its place at the center of that effort.