RESUMO
The European Union (EU) is one of the world’s largest markets, aid donors, health care innovators and tradingpowers. As such, many of its policies affect global health. EU policies affect global health directly, as with overseas aid, trade policy or support for the World Health Organization (WHO). They also affect global health indirectly, as with the many internally focused policies which affect health and health policy options in other countries, such as research priorities or medicines regulation. The extensive range of policy areas that touch global health mean that the EU has a wide range of policy tools which inevitably shape global health, and which the EU can use intentionally to shape health governance and outcomes worldwide.The broad shape of any coherent strategy or approach to global health, in the complex institutional environment ofEurope, must align priorities with tools, identifying what the EU wants to achieve in the global health sphere andwhich policy tools will be best suited to have the desired effects. Alignment requires consideration of the differentways in which countries near the EU already relate to it (e.g. accession candidates) and should include anappreciation of which actors should use the different policy tools, with respect to subsidiarity as well as the advantages of joint action in some areas. The review of EU instruments clearly shows the immense scale of the impact of existing EU policies on global health, and the potential that a coherent approach could have to strengthen global health governance and improve global health policies and outcomes. The EU affects global health through many different policies; the question is how, when and by whom these policies will be used for global health.
