Global Health Watch 1 in one file

1 Medicine cannot deal with the many factors that cause ill-health.
lead to improvements in health, such as redistributing wealth, either directly
or through public provision and financing of goods and services, and regulating
the operation of markets and for-profit enterprises. The more steps in the
pathway from globalization to the health of any particular individual, group or
community, the more difficult it becomes to describe the web of causation. In
order to address these difficulties we first describe globalization and extract a
few health lessons from its history.
Globalization past and present
Globalization is best described as ‘a process of greater integration within
the world economy through movements of goods and services, capital, technology
and (to a lesser extent) labour, which lead increasingly to economic decisions
being influenced by global conditions’ (Jenkins 2004). The focus of this
chapter is on trade liberalization (increasing the cross-border flow of goods)
and deregulation of national and international financial markets (facilitating
rapid transnational movements of capital).
Historically, the transnational movement of people has been a crucial element
of globalization, and to some extent remains so. Over 175 million people
lived outside their country of birth in 2000. Remittances of foreign-born workers
to their low- or middle-income countries of origin – some US$ 80 billion
Health for all in a ‘borderless world’?
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