The first and most prominent United Nations Millennium Development Goal (MDG-1) has been widely celebrated. Yet, four reflections should give us pause. Although retaining the idea of "halving extreme poverty by 2015", MDG-1 in fact sets a much less ambitious target than had been agreed to at the...

We suggest how contemporary global institutions shaping the development, pricing and distribution of vaccines and drugs may be modified to deliver large improvements in health. To support a justice argument for such modification, we show how the current global economic order may contribute to...

The Health Impact Fund (Hollis & Pogge 2008) is an innovative financing mechanism for global drug discovery and dissemination, separating the reward for successful R&D from the market price of the drug, also known as de-linkage. Aaron Kesselheim and Kevin Outterson have recently proposed a...

The estimates of the extent, distribution and trend of global income poverty provided in the World Bank's World Development Reports for 1990 and 2000/01 are neither meaningful nor reliable. The Bank uses an arbitrary international poverty line unrelated to any clear conception of what poverty...

Martin Ravallion?s ?One Pager? No. 66 focuses on two key issues: the level of the World Bank?s international poverty line (IPL) and its conversion to other currencies and years. Having written on conversion before (?One Pager? No. 54), I can be brief. The purchasing power parities the Bank uses...

The increasingly widespread expression “global justice” marks an important shift in the structure of moral discourse. Traditionally, international relations were seen as sharply distinct from domestic justice. First, it focused on interactions among states, and later, evaluated the design of...

In 1961, the United States Department of Agriculture published an Economy Food Plan carefully designed ?as a nutritionally adequate diet for short-term or emergency use? for poor people. This diet was updated and later re-branded as the Thrifty Food Plan. The lowest cost stated for this minimal...