Where the Line is Drawn. A Rejoinder to Ravallion

Martin Ravallion?s ?One Pager? No. 66 focuses on two key issues: the level of the World Bank?s international poverty line (IPL) and its conversion to other currencies and years. Having written on conversion before (?One Pager? No. 54), I can be brief. The purchasing power parities the Bank uses to convert its IPL into other currencies at best preserve purchasing power equivalence relative to the pattern of international household consumption. Similarly, the consumer price indices the Bank uses to convert the results to other years at best preserve purchasing power equivalence relative to each national household consumption basket. Such conversions are unsuitable within a poverty measurement exercise because the prices of necessaries play a much greater role in the lives of the poor than in general consumption expenditure. (...)Where the Line is Drawn. A Rejoinder to Ravallion

A Consistent Measure of Real Poverty: A Reply to Ravallion

In 1961, the United States Department of Agriculture published an Economy Food Plan carefully designed ?as a nutritionally adequate diet for short-term or emergency use? for poor people. This diet was updated and later re-branded as the Thrifty Food Plan. The lowest cost stated for this minimal diet was $80.40 per person per month in 1999. (...)A Consistent Measure of Real Poverty: A Reply to Ravallion

The Health Impact Fund: More justice and efficiency in global health

Some 18 million people die annually from poverty-related causes. Many more are suffering grievously from treatable medical conditions. These burdens can be substantially reduced by supplementing the rules governing pharmaceutical innovation. Established by the World Trade Organization's TRIPS Agreement, these rules cause advanced medicines to be priced beyond the reach of the poor and steer medical research away from diseases concentrated among them. We should complement these rules with the Health Impact Fund. Financed by many governments, the HIF would offer any new pharmaceutical product the opportunity to participate, during its first ten years, in the HIF's annual reward pools, receiving a share equal to its share of the assessed global health impact of all HIF-registered products. In exchange, the innovator would have to agree to make this product available worldwide at the lowest feasible cost of manufacture. Fully consistent with TRIPS, the HIF achieves three key advances. It directs some pharmaceutical innovation toward the most serious diseases, including those concentrated among the poor. It makes all HIF-registered medicines cheaply available to all. And it incentivizes innovators to promote the optimal use of their HIF-registered medicines. Magnifying one another's effects, these advances would engender large global health gains.aid

Justice and the Convention on Biological Diversity

Benefit sharing as envisaged by the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) is a relatively new idea in international law. Within the context of non-human biological resources, it aims to guarantee the conservation of biodiversity and its sustainable use by ensuring that its custodians are adequately rewarded for its preservation. Prior to the adoption of the CBD, access to biological resources was frequently regarded as a free-for-all. Bioprospectors were able to take resources out of their natural habitat and develop commercial products without sharing benefits with states or local communities. This paper asks how CBD-style benefit-sharing fits into debates of justice. It is argued that the CBD is an example of a set of social rules designed to increase social utility. It is also argued that a common heritage of humankind principle with inbuilt benefit-sharing mechanisms would be preferable to assigning bureaucratic property rights to non-human biological resources. However, as long as the international economic order is characterized by serious distributive injustices, as reflected in the enormous poverty-related death toll in developing countries, any morally acceptable means toward redressing the balance in favor of the disadvantaged has to be welcomed. By legislating for a system of justice-in-exchange covering nonhuman biological resources in preference to a free-for-all situation, the CBD provides a small step forward in redressing the distributive justice balance. It therefore presents just legislation sensitive to the international relations context in the 21st century

The Health Impact Fund: a new paradigm in pharmaceutical innovation

Hem après que la velocitat i la qualitat de la innovació es poden augmentar molt mitjançant la concessió als innovadors de monopolis temporals, com ara patents o drets d'autor, que els permeten obtenir guanys mitjançant el cobrament de marges elevats. Però aquest tipus de monopolis temporals promouen la innovació a costa de la difusió. En altres paraules, com més innovem o incentivem la innovació, més paguem en termes de la difusió d'aquestes mateixes innovacions. Premiar la innovació de manera equivocada en les àrees de la producció de medicaments, de la producció d'aliments i en la innovació ambiental té efectes especialment greus per als pobres. El sistema actual no és eficient en termes d'accés, selecció d'objectius i rendibilitat. El Fons per a l'Impacte sobre la Salut (Health Impact Fund) proposa una nova manera de pagar la innovació farmacèutica, incentivant el desenvolupament i subministrament de nous medicaments a través de mecanismes de pagament per resultats. A més, la mateixa idea es podria aplicar a la innovació agrícola i ambiental.We have learned that the speed and quality of innovation can be substantially raised by granting innovators temporary monopolies, such as patents or copyrights, which enable them to profit by charging high mark-ups. But such temporary monopolies promote innovation at the expense of diffusion. In other words, the better we innovate, or incentivize innovation, the more we pay a price in terms of the diffusion of those same innovations. Rewarding innovation in the wrong way in the areas of pharmaceuticals, food production, and environmental innovation has especially serious effects on the poor. The current system does poorly with regard to access targeting and cost-effectiveness. The Health Impact Fund proposes a new way of paying for pharmaceutical innovation by incentivizing the development and delivery of new drugs through pay-for-performance mechanisms. Furthermore, the same idea could be applied to agricultural and environmental innovation. [Contrib Sci 10:23-28 (2014)

How Many Poor People Should There Be? A Rejoinder to Ravallion

Greatly boosting the political importance of the $1/day poverty headcount statistics the World Bank had been supplying since 1990, the first Millennium Development Goal (MDG) then promised "to halve, by the year 2015, the proportion of the world's people whose income is less than one dollar a day and the proportion of people who suffer from hunger." The UN and its MDG administrators have since decided that this proportion is to be calculated as a percentage not of world population but of the faster-growing population of the less developed countries, and that the benchmark year for this and all MDGs should be not the year of their adoption (2000), but 1990. The fate of billions is gravely affected by these as well as by additional decisions about how the relevant calculations are performed by the World Bank. It is in this context that Sanjay Reddy and I have joined the poverty measurement debate

Comment on Mathias Risse: "A Right to Work? A Right to Leisure? Labor Rights as Human Rights"

In his ambitious paper, Risse addresses many important topics ranging from very general issues about what human rights are to quite specific questions about rights to work and leisure. I comment on four themes arranged in order of decreasing generality: Risse's understanding of what human rights are, Risse's suggestion that a conception of human rights should best be "basis-driven," Risse's particular basis-driven conception of human rights, and Risse's specific position on human rights relating to labor and leisure.What grounds can Risse give us for accepting his revisionist understanding of human rights as membership rights, which is so dramatically at odds with fundamental fixed points that have been taken for granted in human rights disputes over the last 60 years or so? If Risse has his way, then the treatment of a human being by others raises human rights concerns only if she is a participant in the global order and only if her treatment is a matter of international concern. It is obvious how this understanding of human rights is welcome to those who seek to free their own conduct or their country's policies from human-rights constraints. Appealing to Risse's understanding, they will be able to block criticisms based on human rights by denying, for example, that the people of the Gaza Strip are members of the global order or by denying that the torture of Burmese citizens within Burma is a matter of international concern. For those whose human rights are in jeopardy, Risse's understanding of human rights could be a disaster. We should therefore examine very closely the arguments he may yet produce for his understanding and, unless they are hugely compelling, stick to the orthodox understanding of human rights as rights that all human beings have against all other human agents

Una Medida Consistente de la Pobreza Real: Una Respuesta a Ravallion

En 1961, el Departamento de Agricultura de los Estados Unidos publicó un Plan de Economía Alimentaria cuidadosamente diseñado ?como una dieta nutricionalmente adecuada para corto plazo o emergencias? para las personas pobres. Esta dieta fue actualizada y posteriormente renombrada como el Plan de Ahorro Alimentario. El costo más bajo establecido para esta dieta mínima fue de 80,40 dólares por persona por mes en 1999. (...)Una Medida Consistente de la Pobreza Real: Una Respuesta a Ravallion

Uma Medida Consistente da Pobreza Real: Uma Resposta a Ravallion

Em 1961, o Departamento de Agricultura dos Estados Unidos publicou um Plano de Economia Alimentar cuidadosamente concebido ?como uma dieta nutricionalmente adequada para uso emergencial ou em curto prazo? pelas pessoas pobres. Essa dieta foi atualizada e, posteriormente, renomeada como Plano Alimentar Simplificado. O menor custo estipulado para essa dieta mínima foi de 80,40 dólares mensais por pessoa, em 1999. (...)Uma Medida Consistente da Pobreza Real: Uma Resposta a Ravallion