Substandard and falsified medicines kill patients, yet progress on the twin challenges of safeguarding the quality of genuine medicine and criminalising falsified ones has been held back by controversy over intellectual property rights and confusion over terms. Amir Attaran and colleagues...

When we invoked the example of the US National Basketball Association's (NBA's) scheme for redistribution of new talent as a model offering lessons for a possible future global social support system we hoped that we would stimulate debate. Consequently, we are very grateful to Goldblatt and...

While the right to health is increasingly referenced in Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) discussions, its contribution to global health and development remains subject to considerable debate. This hypothesis explores the potential influence of the right to health on the formulation of health...

If global trade were fair, it is argued, then international aid would be unnecessary and inequalities inherent to the economic system would be justifiable. Here, we argue that while global trade is unfair, in part because richer countries set the rules, we believe that additional interventions...

Preventable and treatable injuries and diseases are overwhelming sub-Saharan Africa, the Indian subcontinent, and other impoverished areas of the world. Why are health outcomes among the world’s poor so dire after the first decade of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and despite a...

COVID-19 mortality has remained low in the poorest countries, exposing the fragile link between prosperity and health. Emerging evidence suggests SARS-CoV-2 did spread widely in low-income countries, but infections were largely asymptomatic. We suggest the demographic transition, the...

A forthcoming report by the World Health Organization (WHO) on evidence for policy is already fuelling passionate debate, especially among scientists. Opinions are divided: some scientists believe strongly in the systematic assessment of evidence on the effectiveness of health system...

Globalization, a process characterized by the growing interdependence of the world's people, impacts health systems and the social determinants of health in ways that are detrimental to health equity. In a world in which there are few countervailing normative and policy approaches to the...

Background: Concerns about rising health care costs require rigorous economic study to inform clinical and policy decision-making. Micro-costing is a cost estimation methodology employing detailed resource utilization and unit cost data to generate precise estimates of economic costs....

We investigate whether better population health may impact economic performance through improvements in technical efficiency in agricultural production. Using district-level data from India, we employ a random-coefficients approach to estimate a Cobb-Douglas production function, computing...