Health, Economic Growth, and Poverty Reduction

The World Health Organization welcomes requests for permission to reproduce or translate its publications, in part or in full. Applications and enquiries should be addressed to the Office of Publications, World Health Organization, Geneva, Switzerland, which will be glad to provide the latest information on any changes made to the text, plans for new editions, and reprints and translations already available. The designations employed and the presentation of the material in this publication do not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever on the part of the Secretariat of the World Health Organization concerning the legal status of any country, territory, city or area or of its authorities, or concerning the delimitation of its frontiers or boundaries. The mention of specific companies or of certain manufacturers' products does not imply that they are endorsed or recommended by the World Health Organization in preference to others of a similar nature that are not mentioned. Errors and omissions excepted, the names of proprietary products are distinguished by initial capital letters Information concerning the content of the report should be referred to: Foreword The Commission on Macroeconomics and Health (CMH) was launched in January 2000 by Dr Gro Harlem Brundtland, Director-General of the World Health Organization. Its mission was to analyze the impact of health on development and to examine ways in which health-related investments could spur economic development. The Commission worked to develop specific recommendations that would save lives, reduce poverty , and spur economic growth through a scaling up of investments in the health sector of developing countries. The final report of the Commission, Macroeconomics and Health: Investing in Health for Economic Development, was released in December 2001. The Commission focused its work on the world's poorest people, in the world's poorest countries. Millions of impoverished people die every year of conditions that are readily prevented or treated. Technologies exist to avert millions of deaths due to malaria, TB, HIV/AIDS, diarrhoeal disease , respiratory infection, and other killers. These tragic deaths—and the enormous economic and social costs associated with them—reflect the basic fact that essential life-saving health services are out of reach of hundreds of millions of the world's poor. And yet, without extending these life-saving interventions, poverty is likely to be exacerbated and to be passed to the next generation. The economic costs of ill health, the Commission documented, are enormous and pervasive. The findings of the Commission are both …