The 300 richest people on the planet have the same wealth as the bottom 3 billion, according to this video.

Remarkable chart from the National Institute for Economic and Social Research showing what has happened to GDP in each recession, compared to the cyclical peak.

Chart by NIESR

Duncan Green has been awaiting ”the inevitable response from Owen” to a recent post by Dr Kamal-Yanni of Oxfam and Daniel Berman of Médecins Sans Frontières about different approaches to getting vaccines into developing countries. The main point of disagreement is how vaccines first developed with rich countries in mind can best be made available quickly and at an affordable price in developing countries.  This is an important issue because we have a poor record of making these vaccines available, which is part of the reason that 2 million people die each year of vaccine-preventable diseases.

There is a separate but related question of how we can get vaccines to be developed in the first place to protect against diseases which do not much affect people in rich countries. On this we apparently agree that it is a good idea to test commercial incentives such as Advance Market Commitments.

For vaccines developed primarily for industrialised countries, my view – which I expressed in an earlier blog post – is that we should use aid to make it more attractive, and more profitable, for pharmaceutical companies to invest in making these vaccines available in developing countries. The view of Dr Kamal-Yanni and Daniel Berman is that, on the contrary, we should “err on the side of the poor” by holding down prices, making these markets less profitable.

My ‘inevitable response’ is now on the CGD global health blog (and reproduced below).  It is all a bit down in the weeds, but the main point is that it is simplistic to suggest that existing vaccines (for example, against pneumococcal infection) can simply be rolled out at marginal cost in the developing world. I explain why in in the blog post. Unless we do something to make these markets more attractive for the private sector, we will continue to see delays in access to vaccines in poor countries.  In these circumstances, insisting on keeping prices down errs on the side of the ideology, not the side of the poor.

As always it would be great to have your views: comments are open on the CGD blog.

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There seems to be some confusion about what the international definition of poverty actually means.

The Millennium Development Goal is to halve, between 1990 and 2015, the number proportion of people living in extreme poverty.  The poverty line was… Continue reading →