Defining and conceptualising the commercial determinants of health.

Although commercial entities can contribute positively to health and society there is growing evidence that the products and practices of some commercial actors-notably the largest transnational corporations-are responsible for escalating rates of avoidable ill health, planetary damage, and social and health inequity; these problems are increasingly referred to as the commercial determinants of health. The climate emergency, the non-communicable disease epidemic, and that just four industry sectors (ie, tobacco, ultra-processed food, fossil fuel, and alcohol) already account for at least a third of global deaths illustrate the scale and huge economic cost of the problem. This paper, the first in a Series on the commercial determinants of health, explains how the shift towards market fundamentalism and increasingly powerful transnational corporations has created a pathological system in which commercial actors are increasingly enabled to cause harm and externalise the costs of doing so. Consequently, as harms to human and planetary health increase, commercial sector wealth and power increase, whereas the countervailing forces having to meet these costs (notably individuals, governments, and civil society organisations) become correspondingly impoverished and disempowered or captured by commercial interests. This power imbalance leads to policy inertia; although many policy solutions are available, they are not being implemented. Health harms are escalating, leaving health-care systems increasingly unable to cope. Governments can and must act to improve, rather than continue to threaten, the wellbeing of future generations, development, and economic growth.

Bringing Production Back into Development: An introduction.

Production was at the heart of economics from the days of Classical economics. However, with the rise of Neoclassical economics in the late 19th century, production has lost its status as the ultimate interest of economics. Several opportunities for fruitful integration of alternative streams of economics research-Evolutionary, Structuralist and Keynesian in particular-have been also missed. Even the humanist approaches to development, such as Sen's Human Capability Approach, paid little attention to the domain of production. In this article, we argue that the fragmentation of the production-centred paradigm has weakened both academic research and policy-making related to economic development. We introduce and discuss eight articles developed around the special issue theme of Bringing Production Back into Development. We argue that a renewed 'productionist' agenda is essential to address the structural challenges faced by developing countries, even more so after the revelation of structural weaknesses by the pandemic.

La production était au cœur de l'économie depuis l'époque de l'économie classique. Cependant, avec l'essor de l'économie néoclassique à la fin du XIXe siècle, la production a perdu son statut de centre d'intérêt ultime de l'économie. Ont également été manquées plusieurs opportunités d'intégration fructueuse avec des courants alternatifs de recherche en économie, en particulier l'évolutionnisme, le structuralisme et le keynésianisme. Même les approches humanistes du développement, telles que l'approche par les capacités humaines de Sen, n'accordaient que peu d'attention au domaine de la production. Dans cet article, nous soutenons que la fragmentation du paradigme centré sur la production a affaibli à la fois la recherche universitaire et l'élaboration des politiques liées au développement économique. Nous présentons et discutons de huit articles développés autour du thème de ce numéro spécial, « Le retour de la production au sein du développement ¼. Nous soutenons qu'un programme «productiviste¼ renouvelé est essentiel pour relever les défis structurels auxquels sont confrontés les pays en développement, et plus encore après la dynamique accélérée insufflée par la pandémie.