Global health is at a crossroads. The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development has come with ambitious targets for health and health services worldwide. To reach these targets, many more billions of dollars need to be spent on health. However, development assistance for health has plateaued and domestic funding on health in most countries is growing at rates too low to close the financing gap. National and international decision-makers face tough choices about how scarce health care resources should be spent. Should additional funds be spent on primary prevention of stroke, treating childhood cancer, or expanding treatment for HIV/AIDS? Should health coverage decisions take into account the effects of illness on productivity, household finances, and children's educational attainment, or just focus on health outcomes? Does age matter for priority setting or should it be ignored? Are health gains far in the future less important than gains in the present? Should higher priority be given to people who are sicker or poorer? Global Health Priority-Setting provides a framework for how to think about evidence-based priority-setting in health. Over 18 chapters, ethicists, philosophers, economists, policy-makers, and clinicians from around the world assess the state of current practice in national and global priority setting, describe new tools and methodologies to address establishing global health priorities, and tackle the most important ethical questions that decision-makers must consider in allocating health resources.

Prioritarianism is an ethical theory that gives extra weight to the well-being of the worse off. In contrast, dominant policy-evaluation methodologies, such as benefit-cost analysis, cost-effectiveness analysis, and utilitarianism, ignore or downplay issues of fair distribution. Based on a research group founded by the editors, this important book is the first to show how prioritarianism can be used to assess governmental policies and evaluate societal conditions. This book uses prioritarianism as a methodology to evaluate governmental policy across a variety of policy domains: taxation, health policy, risk regulation, education, climate policy, and the COVID-19 pandemic. It is also the first to demonstrate how prioritarianism improves on GDP as an indicator of a society's progress over time. Edited by two senior figures in the field with contributions from some of the world's leading economists, this volume bridges the gap from the theory of prioritarianism to its practical application.

Of every thousand children born in Iceland, two will die before their first birthday, but in Mozambique the death rate is sixty times higher. Even within countries - including some of the wealthiest - inequalities in longevity and health can be substantial. In recent years, epidemiologists have documented the extent of these inequalities both between and within countries, stimulating in turn research both on their sources and on possible means for their alleviation. These extensive and influential efforts in research and in policy development have raised health inequalities to a prominent position among the central concerns of both national and global health.
Less attention has been given to careful analysis and refinement of some key concepts and values that guide and motivate these studies of health inequalities. The essays in this book demonstrate the need to identify and debate alternative positions on the choice of measures of health inequality; the definitions of 'inequality' and 'inequity' in health, and their interrelationship; the ethical basis for attaching priority to narrowing gaps in longevity and health among individuals, groups, and societies; and the possible solutions to a series of puzzles involving uncertainty and variable population size.
The authors of these essays are philosophers, economists, epidemiologists, and physicians contributing to our understanding of ethical issues in population health. Their contributions will be of interest to anyone interested in inequalities in health, including specialists in health policy, public health, epidemiology, moral philosophy, demography, and health economics.