Increasing global poverty

The recently released report of the World Health Organisation, “Social Determinants of Health”, gets this scathing response from the Adam Smith Institute:

Declaring that ’social injustice is killing people on a grand scale’, the report proposes a vertiginous list of government interventions to help iron out inequality, from taxation to town planning. Many of their recommendations are particularly aimed at developing countries.create economic stagnation and structural unemployment.

Over the course of 247 pages, the authors make the case that only the wholesale socialisation of society and the economy can improve health. Economic growth, open markets and free trade cause ‘inequality’ and must be rejected.

Most of the recommendations – such as beefing up state welfare and employment regulation, and soaking the rich with tax – would almost certainly

And calling for an end to free trade is perverse in the extreme. Free trade has been demonstrated to be the biggest weapon ever against poverty. Since China recommenced international trade in the 1980s, 400 million people lifted themselves out of poverty in that country alone.

The WHO also willfully underestimates the importance of economic growth for health. Despite the report’s undergraduate-style railing against globalization, economic growth is causatively associated with improved health, because it allows people to afford decent living conditions, clean water and fuel.

Without economic growth, there will be no money to pay for these vital things.

It is, or ought to be, baffling that the experience of China, India and other countries in recent years should be ignored in the fight against global poverty. It has been evident for decades that the economics of traditional, twentieth century socialism has failed, as socialist disaster areas from North Korea to Zimbabwe clearly demonstrate. The WHO should stick to medicine.