NEW PAPER: Free trade for better health

Things seem to be going fairly flatly over here in Hong Kong on the first day of the WTO meeting.  So far, most ministers have simply said that they are not especially hopeful that they will agree anything.

They should keep trying! Increased trade liberalisation could bring huge benefits for the poor of the world, especially with regard to their health.

This new CFD paper shows that the last 50 years of trade liberalisation has had a significant impact on global health, driving up life expectancies and reducing the burden of age-old diseases. 

This is because free trade is clearly linked with rising prosperity, which allows people to buy improvements in sanitation, nutrition and living conditions.

Secondly, free trade has helped spread health-related technologies all over the world from the countries in which they were first discovered.  In the years following the Second World War, the global spread of drugs such as penicillin – a medicine discovered and developed in Britain – had a massive impact on mortality in many poor countries. Similarly, the spread of other technologies developed in rich countries, such as DDT, have significantly reduced the incidence of malaria worldwide.

Click here to read the paper in full.