The Global Health Economy

Understanding Policy Priorities for the 21st Century

This research project studies the emerging technology-driven global health economy in which purely national health policies are often no longer fully effective, nor efficient.  The general theme of this interdisciplinary effort, drawing on an international network of economists and leading researchers in social medicine, is the impact of globalisation and technological change on health-related consumer behaviour, the divergence between private and social incentives in the generation and adoption of healthcare technologies and the practice of medical decision making.

Healthcare technologies, such as new drugs and medical devices, are often developed, produced and disseminated under strongly increasing returns to scale.  As globalization increases the scale, it tends to boost innovators’ incentives and can help make more of these technologies accessible to increasing numbers of patients worldwide.  Yet many countries still pursue national health policies that aim to limit healthcare spending without proper consideration of the true value of gains in longevity and quality of life that new healthcare technologies can afford.  Such policies may include arbitrary price controls or explicit access restrictions.        

Our research project aims to provide a better understanding of how private and public investments in health can be made more efficient and access barriers to knowledge and new technologies be reduced.  We believe identifying the best policies to square efficiency with equity in access and opportunity can turn the global health economy into a potent driving force of economic development, growth and convergence of living standards in the 21st century.  European health policy, with its dual emphasis on equity and efficiency, may well become a model for the development of health systems in other parts of the world, especially in Asian countries with a similar preference for social cohesion.

Morespecifically, our research is designed to

• improve the informational basis for policies aiming to influence health-related consumer behaviour;
• forecast people’s willingness to pay for healthcare and health insurance in a more reliable way than mere generational accounting exercises can;
• better understand the role of national and global public goods in addressing health-related inequalities;
• identify new opportunities and constraints for healthcare reform in individual countries, such as Germany;
• explore the opportunities of European integration for healthcare and health insurance markets;
• inform on WTO policies with regard to trade-related intellectual property rights, trade in health-related products, such as foods and pharmaceuticals, and trade in health insurance services; and
• to improve our understanding of innovations in financial markets so that their large unexploited opportunities for sharing health-related risks within and across countries can be exploited and a new role for supervisory and regulatory authorities can be identified and discussed.

Our dissemination strategy comprises policy clinics, aimed at the policy-making community and the general public, as well as international workshops and research conferences, aimed at the academic community. These high-level research events include the ESF-IfW Conferences on The Global Health Economy and the European Doctoral Workshops on Health Economics, Social Medicine, and Health Policy. We also present our findings at important third-party events, such as the biennual World Congress on Health Economics of the International Health Economics Association and the World AIDS Conference of the International AIDS Society.

Our current research projects have their main focus on (i) financing healthcare, (ii) technology policy in health care, (iii) health systems in aging societies, (iv) the role of medical technology in the demographic transition of the 21st century, (v) technological change in the global health economy, (vi) the rationale for international health policy, (vii) AIDS in Eastern Europe, and (viii) cost-effective treatment of HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa.