The 'nanny state' has expanded in recent years. Politicians and bureaucrats have increasingly sought to restrict what individuals are permitted to do with their own bodies on their own property. Prohibitions is a corrective to the prevailing support for such authoritarianism. This collection...

I investigate how changes in fees paid to Medicaid physicians affect take-up among children in low-income families. The existing literature suggests that the low level of Medicaid fee payments to physicians reduces their willingness to see Medicaid patients, thus creating an access-to-care...

Recent outbreaks of infectious pathogens such as Zika, Ebola, and COVID-19 have underscored the need for the dependable availability of vaccines against emerging infectious diseases (EIDs). The cost and risk of R&D programs and uniquely unpredictable demand for EID vaccines have discouraged...

How did a health crisis translate to an economic crisis? Why did the spread of the coronavirus bring the global economy to its knees? The answer lies in two methods by which coronavirus stifled economic activities. First, the spread of the virus encouraged social distancing which led to the...

This primer aims to provide IMF macroeconomists with the essential information they need to address issues concerning health sector policy, particularly when they have significant macroeconomic implications. Such issues can also affect equity and growth and are fundamental to any strategy of...

2019 novel coronavirus has affected over 19.3 million people and caused over 718 thousand deaths globally (as at 7 August 2020). The disease was named as “Covid19” and the virus that causes it was Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Corona Virus -2 (SARS-COV-2). On the eve of 2020, when the...

This paper examined the effect of COVID-19 pandemic on global stock markets. Daily closing prices were obtained from Wall Street data base from 1st January to 31st March 2020. For the analysis 80 trading days were used from 20th January, 2020, when the news of COVID-19 pandemic broke out to 11th...

In a sign of their increasing frustration with global efforts to ensure that all people everywhere will have access to COVID-19 vaccines, several developing countries have asked other members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) to join them in a sweeping waiver of the intellectual property...

Over the past several years, the federal government has consulted widely in formulating new rules for the regulation of brand-name drug prices through the Patented Medicine Prices Review Board (PMPRB) and a long-delayed set of rules that are expected to result in large price reductions, now...

The problem of antimicrobial resistance has led some infectious disease experts and their professional societies to propose the use of transferable intellectual property rights (wildcard patents) and patent term extensions as methods to encourage antimicrobial Ramp;D. We evaluate recent...