Intersectionality has emerged as an important framework for understanding and responding to health inequities by making visible the fluid and interconnected structures of power that create them. It promotes an understanding of the dynamic nature of the privileges and disadvantages that permeate health systems and affect health. It considers the interaction of different social stratifiers (e.g. ‘race’/ ethnicity, indigeneity, gender, class, sexuality, geography, age, disability/ability, migration status, religion) and the power structures that ...

Challenging Inequities in Health, was conceived as a response to the following: 1. Concerns about widening “health gaps” both between and within countries; 2. A disproportionate research focus on inequalities in health in the “North” to the relative neglect of the “South”; and 3. Inadequate analytic tools and pragmatic policies to redress health inequities. Through a collective effort of researchers and practitioners called the Global Health Equity Initiative (GHEI), a set of in-depth country studies and conceptual analyses on health equity ...

The paper surveys the economics literature on equity in health care financing and delivery. The focus is, for the most part, on empirical work, especially that involving intemational and temporal comparisons. There is, however, some discussion of the concept and definition of equity. The empirical sections cover the literature on equity in health care financing (progressivity and horizontal equity of health care financing arrangements), equity in health care delivery (horizontal equity in the sense of treating persons in equal need similarly), ...

Poverty reduction is a central feature of the international development agenda and contemporary poverty reduction strategies increasingly focus on “targeting the poor”, yet poverty and inequality remain intractable foes. Combating Poverty and Inequality argues that this is because many current approaches to reducing poverty and inequality fail to consider key institutional, policy and political dimensions that may be both causes of poverty and inequality, and obstacles to their reduction. Moreover, when a substantial proportion of a country’s ...

Well-being is not just a question of the wealth or pleasure that a person has; it is a question of how people manage to live their lives and the ability they have to do certain things that are important to them. This was the argument put forward by Professor Amartya Sen in 1979. In his seminal Tanner Lecture – ‘Equality of What?’, Sen unites economics and philosophy to explore how a person’s well-being might best be measured. It was the first in a series of writings in which he developed his capability approach. This focuses on the actual capability ...

Focus must be shifted from income inequality to economic inequality because of the presence of causal influences on individual well-being and freedom that are economic in nature but cannot be expounded by simple statistics of incomes and commodity holdings. Attention must be given to heterogeneous magnitudes. Moreover, there is a need for the derivation of partial orderings based on explicit or implicit public acceptance.

Significance We find that global warming has very likely exacerbated global economic inequality, including ∼25% increase in population-weighted between-country inequality over the past half century. This increase results from the impact of warming on annual economic growth, which over the course of decades has accumulated robust and substantial declines in economic output in hotter, poorer countries—and increases in many cooler, wealthier countries—relative to a world without anthropogenic warming. Thus, the global warming caused by ...