Health is at the heart of the Millennium Development Goals, but has the world got its spending priorities right? Devi Sridhar, Director of Global Health Governance at GEG, and Lawrence Gostin pose a new set of questions for global health funding in their article Caring About Health for Chatham House’s The World Today.

How does health compare to other global priorities? What drives success in public health? On what areas should developing country governments focus to improve health?

You can read Caring About Health via Chatham House. You may also be interested in Devi Sridhar’s blog globalhealthpolicy.net and her contribution to World Policy Journal’s The Big Question: What is the Most Pressing Health Crisis and How Can It Be Solved?

The 2010 Levine Prize awarded Special Recognition to The Politics of Global Regulation, edited by Walter Mattli and Ngaire Woods. The Prize Committee said that this volume:

“critically reflects upon the increasing voice among countries to tighten up regulatory control at the national and global levels. Will we see the rise of ‘regulatory states’ of a new kind? This book serves as a timely caution that regulatory capture or hijacking could take place in this newfound enthusiasm for regulation.”

More information about book, including the introductory chapter, is available via Princeton University Press.

GEG’s Expert Taskforce on Global Knowledge Governance invites you to take part in a short international survey on Global Knowledge Governance and Intellectual Property.

The survey will help us gather a diversity of views from around the world on challenges facing the international institutional arrangements and processes that shape the rules and practices for creating, using and sharing knowledge – and related goods and services. We also seek views on principles that should guide reforms and specific options for consideration. The survey focuses particular attention on questions of how global governance influences international intellectual property-related rules and practices.

For more information and to participate in the survey, click here.

In a letter to the Financial Times, Ngaire Woods addresses the Greek crisis, arguing that Greece must must default thoroughly, so as to assure the markets that no further default is likely. She writes:

‘Sir, Well-meaning friends can be perilous. Intervention by the International Monetary Fund and the European Union has staved off Greek default, for the time being. Over a decade ago the IMF intervened in Argentina, providing a $15bn “blindage” or shield against the markets. The result was to postpone Argentina’s inevitable default and to increase the costs to Argentina.

‘Greece has just received the same. The package bails out banks holding Greek debt. It reflects an official view that, above all, default must be averted. But surely Greece must default…see the FT.com

For more, see GEG’s Recommended Reading on Sovereign Defaults.

Ngaire Woods features in the latest Economist debate, defending the motion:

This house believes that making trade fairer is more important than making it freer.

Trade needs saving, Woods argues, but freer trade will not do the trick. Her opponent is Jagdish Bhagwati of Columbia University, and GEG Senior Fellow Kevin Watkins also weighed in on the debate. Read their statements and comments from the floor at The Economist.

*UPDATE* The votes are in: Ngaire Woods won the debate with 55% support. Announcing the result, moderator Saugato Datta remarked:

‘Ngaire Woods, proposing the motion that making trade fairer is more important than making it freer, began with less than half of the vote. But she steadily gained converts through the course of the debate. In the end, a solid majority of 55% voted for the motion, making Ms Woods the winner. Jagdish Bhagwati made many fine arguments and contributed immensely to the process of clarifying just what it was that was being debated, but he could not, in the end, convince enough participants to support him.’

A recent study by Devi Sridhar, GEG Senior Researcher, and Eduardo Gomez examines the role the international community plays in financing in Brazil, Russia and India. Commenting on the study, Laurie Garrett of the Council of Foreign Relations noted in a recent letter:

‘The Big Four emerging market economies, India, Brazil, China and Russia, are still aid recipients, despite their phenomenal economic growths. Since 2002, external aid dependency for domestic health programs has increased in India and China, stabilized in Russia, and only declined significantly in Brazil. Overwhelmingly, these countries accept foreign aid for health initiatives that they might otherwise either ignore, or grossly under-fund in the absence of external pressure, in the form of offered financial support for HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment, tuberculosis tracking and care, drug abuse aversion programs, malaria prevention, and other initiatives. Though all four countries are overwhelmed by cardiovascular disease, psychiatric illness (especially clinical depression), deaths due to injuries and accidents and cancer, external funding support does not assist in these areas. As a result, there is a tremendous mismatch between government spending priorities for the people of these nations and priority needs’.

As part of the University of Oxford’s OpenSpires project and iTunes U, you can now access many GEG lectures online. Listen again to Ngaire Woods, Sir David King and Cameron Hepburn on governing climate change after Copenhagen; to Poul Nyrup Rasmussen (President of European Socialist Party and former Prime Minister of Denmark) on the post-crisis politics of financial reform; to Helen Clark (UNDP) on the UN’s role in overcoming development challenges; and many more.

To access the audio and video podcasts, visit the University’s podcasts page or search for the Global Economic Governance Programme on iTunes.

GEG Associate Arunabha Ghosh briefed the European Parliament’s Special Committee on the Financial, Economic and Social Crisis (CRIS) on 25 March 2010 in Brussels. Dr. Ghosh was invited to brief the CRIS Committee on the impact of the economic crisis on climate change and international trade and its implications for global governance. More details on the public hearing, chaired by Wolf Klinz (MEP), are available here and Dr. Ghosh’s briefing paper is available here. For more information on Climate Change, visit our Resource Guide to Climate Change.

Dr. Ghosh recently also published a new policy brief on the architecture of the climate regime which can be found here.

In a new GEG Brief, David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu provide a guide to understanding the empirical evidence behind the aid debate and show why it is important to exercise caution in extrapolating policy advice from such data. Both the critics of aid, as well as its proponents, rely upon a limited pool of evidence concerning aid’s effectiveness.  Their interpretations of this evidence, argue Stuckler and Basu, suffer from a series of well-known statistical fallacies and misunderstandings about the limitations of global aid data.

Download Six Concerns about Data in the (Dead) Aid Debate and to read more, visit GEG’s Guide to the (Dead) Aid Debate.

GEG’s Global Migration Governance project has just released its 2009 annual report. To catch up on the project’s activities and publications, download Global Migration Governance: Multiple and Contested Institutions, 2009.