Although knowledge about global health financing has expanded over the past two decades, major gaps remain. We know little, for example, about how much governments spend on major disease areas, how these amounts have evolved over time and how countries compare. A global health financing data revolution is sorely needed. The suite of papers that make up this special issue underline the importance of reliable information about financial resources for health.
March 23, 2017
November 8, 2016
Devex
After more than a decade of immense growth, development assistance for health has flatlined. DAH fueled a scale up of antiretrovirals, insecticide-treated bed nets, vaccinations and a host of important global health interventions. Over the same period, the spread of a number of infectious diseases was reversed, reducing premature death and disability across the developing world. The plateau in international funding may threaten to slow progress or even roll back these gains.
January 2, 2015
The Lancet
In The Lancet Global Health, Stephen Resch and colleagues’ study benchmarks 12 countries’ government expenditure on HIV/AIDS. This important research emphasizes that many governments are not meeting spending goals, and in many countries the financing gaps are so great that, even if they met the spending goals, expenditure would still fall short of what is needed (expenditure would cover only 64% of estimated future funding requirements, leaving a gap of around a third of the total US$7.9 billion needed).
January 8, 2013
PLoS Medicine
We reported that for every dollar a government received in development assistance for health, the government's domestic expenditure on health decreased by $0.46 (95% confidence interval: 0.24, 0.67). Subsequent research questioned those findings, including Batniji and Bendavid in PLOS Medicine who have since admitted mistakes in their statistical model. We argue that these subsequent studies fail to account for the complex, dynamic connection between domestic and foreign funding sources.