Globalization and Health: Pathways, Evidence and Policy

The discipline of global health has recently given rise to dozens of academic health science programs in North America. As a research field, it has been distinguished from international health by its focus on the health of populations that transcends the perspectives of individual nations. Global health ideally integrates medical, public health, and social sciences—including demography, epidemiology, economics, sociology, and political sciences—to address global determinants and distribution of health. Given the enormous influence of widespread poverty and disparity on health, one might expect that the study of poverty and disparity would be a primary subject of interest. Nevertheless, despite vigorous debates among economists on the effect of globalization policies on poverty over the past quarter century, remarkably little attention has been paid to globalization in the field of global health.