World Health Day this year marks 75 years of WHO. WHO has presented a timeline for these years. You might think of different issues that could have been highlighted. The Lancet has published its version of a timeline for WHO 75 years
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(23)00677-3/fulltext
Americans have been hammered for decades with an economic message that amounts to this: When wealthy people like me gain even more wealth through tax cuts, deregulation, and policies that keep wages low, that leads to economic growth and benefits for everyone else in the economy. And equally, that investing in you, raising your wages, forgiving your debt, or helping your family would be bad—for you! This is the trickle-down way of thinking about economic cause and effect, and there can be no doubt that it has substantially contributed to the greatest upward transfer of wealth in the history of the world.
Read the article
In a jubilee year for the World Health Organization, we are still far away from achieving Health for All. For the founders of the WHO, health was “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being”, not simply the absence of physical illness. Their vision did not translate into practice, and people are still denied this fundamental human right, simply because they live in a particular region or because they do not have money to pay for care.
Activists around the world have seized the opportunity brought by this World Health Day to mobilize and point to alternative directions to take. Some of these included looking back at existing concepts, like Comprehensive Primary Health Care, which have been cast aside under neoliberal capitalism.
The struggle for health goes on: World Health Day special (peoples-health-dispatch.ghost.io)
At the end of last month, the annual ECOSOC Special Meeting on Tax was held at the UN. This constituted the first intergovernmental debate on international tax matters following the historic approval of a new UN General Assembly resolution at the end of 2022. The resolution, which was adopted by consensus, includes the decision to “begin intergovernmental discussions in New York at United Nations Headquarters on ways to strengthen the inclusiveness and effectiveness of international tax cooperation”. The Africa Group, which had tabled the resolution, also called for the process to deliver a new UN Convention on Tax.
As governments converge on Washington for the International Monetary Fund (IMF)-World Bank spring meeting, they are confronted with the daunting prospect that 2023 might be the year that the world will be hit by a developing country debt crisis much like that which took place in the early 1980’s that led to the infamous lost decade in Latin America and Africa. A number of defaults on debt repayments over the last three years have served as the alarm bells for a possibly even bigger implosion.
Read the article by Walden Bello
Measurement of income inequality is like measurement of any natural or social phenomenon. We measure inequality as we measure temperature or height of people. The English (or welfarist) school believes that the measure of income inequality is only a proxy for a measure of a more fundamental phenomenon: inequality in welfare. The ultimate variable, according to them, that we want to estimate is welfare (or even happiness) and how it is distributed. Income provides only an empirically feasible short-cut to it.
I would have been sympathetic to that approach if I knew how individual utility can be measured.
Read the article of Branko Milanovic
The number of cholera outbreaks in the world continues to grow, as does the number of infections and deaths. Cholera is a well known disease of poverty, and its spread can be contained in a very simple way: by ensuring access to clean water and sanitation. Still, there seems to be little interest among countries in the Global North to support the response to the outbreaks, at least while they remain far from their borders.
Read the new report of People’s Health Dispatch
The World Bank Group (WBG) is one of the largest multilateral development banks in the world. Its professed mission: to end poverty and promote shared prosperity in developing countries.
But social movements and civil society, especially in the global South, have questioned the WBG’s economic role for decades. They have been criticising the United States’ (US) domination of the institution. The WBG has been opposed for sinking countries in debt, for imposing conditions on said loans, for shaping economies to the benefit of big business instead of people, and even for backing military dictatorships. Seventy-nine years since its establishment, a reckoning is necessary on the WBG’s performance as a supposed development bank.
Read Ibon’s paper
“So hold tight – things are going to get VERY rocky. And remember, many people make a lot of money out of catastrophic events. According to the FT:
But far more make big losses. And a catastrophic failure of the banking and financial system inflicts violent pain on the most innocent and vulnerable.
That, as they say in Hollywood, is financialised capitalism.”
Read Ann Pettifor’s interesting reflections
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