Health in a Time of Austerity – Can Fiscal Measures Help?
Featuring
Ramanan Laxminarayan, Director, Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics & Policy
Host
William Savedoff, Senior Fellow, Center for Global Development
In many countries, it is difficult to raise taxes and therefore difficult to increase spending on health care. Nevertheless, many of the factors that determine population health—and how it is distributed among citizens—do not involve spending more on healthcare services, per se. Rather, the burden of many non-communicable diseases and external injuries can be influenced by creative reform of taxes and subsidies. Taxing tobacco, alcohol, and sugar-sweetened beverages can reduce consumption of products which contribute to cardiovascular disease, traffic accidents, and diabetes. Subsidies for condoms, vaccines, and TB diagnostics can reduce the prevalence of many important infectious diseases.
Ramanan Laxminarayan, Director of the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics & Policy, will present findings from his research with Ian Parry at the International Monetary Fund on the potential for health gains from taxes and subsidies. This lunchtime talk will be moderated by William Savedoff, Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Development.
Related Topics:
Related Experts
Thursday, October 26
1:00 - 2:30 p.m.
Please bring your lunch; beverages will be provided.
Upcoming Events
Oxfam America will host this book launch and discussion on the role of civil society and donors in building better tax systems and strengthening the social contract.
Evidence from US-based firms like Google, Facebook, and Amazon shows that market concentration and the failure of competition policy has had grim effects on productivity and inequality. Indeed, across a handful of industries, only a couple of massive firms control the majority of decisions Americans make as consumers. But what effects does market consolidation have on the rest of the world?
AidEx is a two day event, which encompasses a conference, exhibition, meeting areas, awards and workshops. Its fundamental aim is to engage the sector at every level and provide a forum for aid & development professionals to meet, source, supply and learn. AidEx was created to help the international aid and development community engage the private sector in a neutral setting, drive innovation and support the ever-growing need for emergency aid and development programmes.
Over 1 billion women lack access to financial services due to economic and social barriers, time and mobility constraints, and discrimination Financial services delivered digitally can address these barriers. Closing the global gender gap in access to finance provides an opportunity for the private sector to reach an untapped and profitable market, and provides governments with an opportunity to better reach their constituents. This event looks at the recent evidence on which emerging technologies empower women economically, as well as the importance of cross-sectoral partnership and women’s entrepreneurship in sub-Saharan Africa.
The Center for Global Development, TechnoServe, and the World Bank are pleased to co-host this event in Dar es Salaam. We are committed to finding what works to promote women’s financial inclusion and are conducting innovative research on the potential of digital technologies. This event will launch new research on this topic and bring together leaders in the government and the private sector with experts in finance, development, and technology to have critical conversations on closing the financial gender gap. We hope you can join us.
Agenda details and speakers to be announced.
With the goal of driving down drug costs, governments across the globe have instituted various forms of pharmaceutical price control policies. Understanding the impacts of such policies is particularly important in low- and middle-income countries, where lack of insurance coverage means that prices can serve as a barrier to access for patients and lack of effective quality control may allow for low-quality medicines in the market. In her paper, Emma Boswell Dean examines the theoretical effects of price controls in such markets and then measures the empirical effects of one implementation of pharmaceutical price controls, in which the Indian government placed price ceilings on a set of essential medicines.
The Center for Global Development, CDC Group, and the Centre for Finance and Development are pleased to invite you to the international conference Blended Development Finance and the New Industrial Policy on November 8-9, 2018 at the Graduate Institute Geneva.
This unique conference is designed to convene both the new industrial policy thinkers, who have studied the history of government intervention, and blended finance practitioners, who are involved in setting up the institutions and procedures that will use official development finance to subsidise private enterprise in developing countries. These two communities too often work in isolation and have much to learn from each other.
The conference will combine scholar presentations with high-level policy discussions. Please see the preliminary programme for a list of sessions and speakers, in addition to more details about the conference.
Please join us for this “first of its kind” conference and feel free to share this invitation with your network and encourage your colleagues to attend. We want to reach as many people who work in private sector development as possible.
Please do not hesitate to reach out to sdf@cgdev.org if you have any questions. Free entrance. Registration required.


Commentary Menu