cost-effectiveness analysis (cea) can help countries attain and sustain universal health coverage (uhc), as long as it is context-specific and considered within deliberative processes at the country level. institutionalising robust deliberative processes requires significant time and resources, however, and countries often begin by demanding evidence (including local cea evidence as well as evi...

what counts as global health? there has been limited discourse to date on the ways in which country-level contexts may shape positioning in global health agendas. by reviewing japan’s response to the refugee crisis, we demonstrate a clash between rhetoric and action on global responsibility, and suggest that cultural and historical factors may be related to the ways of perceiving and acting upo...

Shiffman rightly raises questions about who exercises power in global health, suggesting power is a complex concept, and the way it is exercised is often opaque. Power that is not based on financial strength but on knowledge or experience, is difficult to estimate, and yet it may provide the legitimacy to make moral claims on what is, or ought to be, on global health agendas. Twenty years ago p...

brugha and bruen (2014) raise a number of compelling issues related to the interaction between politics and policy in the global health context. the first question that their views invite is whether this is, at heart, best characterized as a benign or malign influence. many commentators have suggested that this overlap should be discouraged (see, for example, marseille et al 2002; thomas & webe...

the paper published in the january 2015 issue of this journal by gusmano and colleagues entitled “shanghai rising: health improvements as measured by avoidable mortality since 2000” has spurred this commentary. we discuss controversial issues surrounding the concept of avoidable mortality in health service research in general and gusmano’s study in particular. the impact of overall social devel...

the grand challenge in global health is the inequality in mortality and life expectancy between countries and within countries. according to global health 2035, the lancet commission celebrating the 20th anniversary of the world development report (wdr) of 1993, the world now has the unique opportunity to achieve a grand convergence in global mortality within a generation. this article comments...

while the right to health is increasingly referenced in sustainable development goal (sdg) discussions, its contribution to global health and development remains subject to considerable debate. this hypothesis explores the potential influence of the right to health on the formulation of health goals in 4 major sdg reports. we analyse these reports through a social constructivist lens which view...

over half of the world’s population lives in cities and united nations (un) demographers project an increase of 2.5 billion more urban dwellers by 2050. yet there is too little systematic comparative research on the practice of urban health policy and management (hpam), particularly in the megacities of middle-income and developing nations. we make a case for creating a global database on citie...