Global health financing is due for a reckoning. Deteriorating macroeconomic conditions, alongside consequences of the war in Ukraine, and economic scars left by the COVID-19 pandemic have left many low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) with low or negative growth, increasing debt and highly uncer...

As the world faces multiple crises and the economic and health scars left by the pandemic are still evident, it is clear that governments are unlikely to sustain pandemic-era health spending increases in this recovery phase. How can LMICs align their plans and discourse around universal health cover...

Many premature deaths from non-communicable diseases can be prevented if countries enact forceful measures to reduce the risk of their citizens falling prey to these diseases. Making it more expensive to consume tobacco, health-harming alcohol, and sugar-sweetened beverages is key to governments ach...

In this blog, I examine why policymakers should ensure that inflation does not erode corrective taxes on killer products and make them more affordable. Using a survey of recent health tax measures, I show that some countries have ensured that health taxes are stepped up while most have hesitated, an...

In this blog, we look at how economic conditions are likely to further compromise public health financing in the region, how smaller health budgets will be coupled with increasing demands, and what policymakers can do to minimize the negative impact on the health of their populations.

In the language of economists, opportunity cost refers to the return or other forms of benefit that we could have received, but gave up, to take another course of action. In mathematical terms, it is the difference between the utility of what we have chosen and that from the foregone choice. Or, in ...

Governments use corrective taxes to reduce the use of products that harm well-being and create costs not just to society at large (externalities) but also to individual consumers who may underestimate the future health consequences of their current consumption. Taxes on gas to reduce pollution or on...