This article develops the concept of “reign-seeking” to capture the unprecedented collective action of the Thai professional and official elite prior to the 2014 military coup and the establishment of a military regime. It argues that this phenomenon reflects broad and deep political dynamics, for which the dominant scholarship on authoritarianism and Thai politics cannot adequately explain. The changing incentives of these supposedly non-partisan actors are interwoven with neo-liberal governance reform driven by a desire for depoliticisation and ...

This editorial questions the implications of the capability approach for health economics. Two specific issues are considered: the evaluative space of capablities (as opposed to health or utility) and the decision-making principle of maximisation. The paper argues that the capability approach can provide a richer evaluative space enabling improved evaluation of many interventions. It also argues that more thought is needed about the decision-making principles both within the capability approach and within health economics more generally. Specifically, ...

The gross inequalities in health that we see within and between countries present a challenge to the world. That there should be a spread of life expectancy of 48 years among countries and 20 years or more within countries is not inevitable. A burgeoning volume of research identifies social factors at the root of much of these inequalities in health. Social determinants are relevant to communicable and non-communicable disease alike. Health status, therefore, should be of concern to policy makers in every sector, not solely those involved in ...

A systems approach offers a novel conceptualization to natural and social systems. In recent years, this has led to perceiving population health outcomes as an emergent property of a dynamic and open, complex adaptive system. The current paper explores these themes further and applies the principles of systems approach and complexity science (i.e. systems science) to conceptualize social determinants of health inequalities. The conceptualization can be done in two steps: viewing health inequalities from a systems approach and extending it to ...

Health disparities (differences in health by socioeconomic groups) are a pressing issue in our society. This article provides an overview of a multilevel approach that seeks to understand the mechanisms underlying health disparities by considering factors at the individual, family, and neighborhood levels. In addition, we describe an approach to connecting these factors to various levels of biological processes (systemic inflammation, cellular processes, and genomic pathways) that drive disease pathophysiology. In the second half of the article, ...