The emerging fields of social epidemiology and population health seek to understand the social determinants of health. Especially, with regards to how income inequality causes health disparities, attention has been focused on material and psychosocial mechanisms. I use examples from the epidemiological and social science literature to argue for a third broad etiological framework: the role play...

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...

On February 24, 2022, global political landscapes were shaken by Russian invasion of Ukraine. President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly emphasized that his actions necessary to defend Russia against perceived Western expansionism, with Ukraine being a prominent example due its expressed intention join North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and European Union (EU). This study aims analyze the f...

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...

Striking disparities in access to healthcare and in health outcomes are major characteristics of health across the globe. This inequitable state of global health and how it could be improved has become a highly popularized field of academic study. In a series of articles in this journal the roles of power and politics in global health have been addressed in considerable detail. Three points are...

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...