Structural adjustment programmes and infectious disease mortality

• Published in: PloS one Vol. 17; no. 7; p. e0270344
• Main Authors: Nosrati, Elias, Dowd, Jennifer B, Marmot, Michael, King, Lawrence P
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: San Francisco Public Library of Science 15.07.2022; Public Library of Science (PLoS)
• Subjects: Biology and Life Sciences; Communicable diseases; COVID-19; Disease control; Economic crisis; Engineering and Technology; Fatalities; GDP; Gross Domestic Product; Health care policy; Infections; Infectious diseases; International finance; Medicine and Health Sciences; Mortality; Pandemics; Patient outcomes; Physical Sciences; Physicians; Population; Privatization; Public health; Reforms; Research and Analysis Methods; Respiratory diseases; Social Sciences; Structural adjustment; Success; Tuberculosis; Variables; United States
• ISSN: 1932-6203; 1932-6203
• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0270344

International financial organisations like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) play a central role in shaping the developmental trajectories of fiscally distressed countries through their conditional lending schemes, known as ‘structural adjustment programmes’. These programmes entail wide-ranging domestic policy reforms that influence local health and welfare systems. Using novel panel data from 187 countries between 1990 and 2017 and an instrumental variable technique, we find that IMF programmes lead to over 70 excess deaths from respiratory diseases and tuberculosis per 100,000 population and that IMF-mandated privatisation reforms lead to over 90 excess deaths per 100,000 population. Thus structural adjustment programmes, as currently designed and implemented, are harmful to population health and increase global infectious disease burdens.