In recent years, the interdisciplinary nature of global health has blurred the lines between medicine and social science. As medical journals publish non-experimental research articles on social policies or macro-level interventions, controversies have arisen when social scientists have...

Almost every country exhibits two important health financing trends: health spending per person rises and the share of out-of-pocket spending on health services declines. We describe these trends as a “health financing transition” to provide a conceptual framework for understanding health...

Per capita GDP has limited use as a well-being indicator because it does not capture many dimensions that imply a "good life," such as health and equality of opportunity. However, per capita GDP has the virtues of easy interpretation and can be calculated with manageable data requirements....

The idea of applying a Cash on Delivery Aid (COD Aid) approach to the health sector has been raised many times, particularly in relation to addressing malaria, HIV/AIDS, maternal health, and water. The idea of COD Aid emerged from an analysis of the basic relationships between those who fund and...

Evaluations are key to learning and accountability yet the quality of those evaluations are critical to their usefulness. We assessed the methodological quality of global health program evaluations commissioned or conducted by five major funders and published between 2009 and 2014. From a...

This paper looks at the relationship between health and income. After discussing the general context of health improvements in Latin America during the last few decades, the study elaborates on the interrelationships between the physical and social determinants of health, the complexities that...