The extent of premature death and ill health in the developing world is staggering. Death and ill health on such a scale are matters of concern in their own right. They also foster a brake on economic development. It was these twin concerns that led the international community to put health...

Judge Bryson recently asserted in Association for Molecular Pathology v. US Patent and Trademark Office (dissenting-in-part) that human gene patents "present a significant obstacle to the next generation of innovation in genetic medicine — multiplex tests and whole-genome sequencing." His...

Patents are often portrayed as the necessary reward to compensate pharmaceutical firms for the huge costs and risks associated with Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-mandated clinical trials of new drugs. But the relationship between the patent system and other regulation of drugs is more...

Objective: To study cross-national inequalities in mortality of adults and of children aged 5 years using a novel approach, with clustering techniques to stratify countries into mortality groups (better-off, worse-off, mid-level) and to examine risk factors associated with inequality. Design,...

Background: A world divided by health inequalities poses ethical challenges for global health. International and national responses to health disparities must be rooted in ethical values about health and its distribution; this is because ethical claims have the power to motivate, delineate...

The World Bank began operations on June 25, 1946. Although it was established to finance European reconstruction after World War II, the bank today is a considerable force in the health, nutrition, and population (HNP) sector in developing countries. Indeed, it has evolved from having virtually...

Recent literature recognises that improvements in longevity seen over the last 70 years are the result of the interaction of multiple factors that are both biologically and environmentally based, but quantification of the relative impact of the various factors has proved elusive. This paper...

Die Gesundheitssysteme stehen weltweit zur Diskussion. Kann internationales Benchmarking ganzer Gesundheitssysteme dazu beitragen, Lösungen für deren Probleme zu finden? Diese Arbeit stellt drei aktuelle Ansätze solcher Vergleiche vor. Hierbei werden die Erkenntnisse ebenso erläutert wie die...

Steigende Kosten in den meisten Gesundheitssystemen und die damit verbundenen Finanzierungsprobleme stehen im Focus von vielen empirischen Untersuchungen. Wissenschaftler sind der Meinung, dass falsch gesetzte Anreize einer der Hauptgründe hierfür darstellen. Die vorliegende Arbeit umreißt...

Trade in health products has been flourishing in recent years as the demand for better health has been growing throughout the world. At the same time, trade in health products is hampered by substantive trade barriers. In this paper, we present evidence that countries around the world still...