Bradford Hill Seminar - What are the Policy Levers for Impact on Health and Sustainability?

In this Bradford Hill seminar on 22 November 2023 Professor Jeremy A. Lauer of the Department of Management Science, Strathclyde Business School, University of Strathclyde, discussed:
What are the Policy Levers for Impact on Health and Sustainability?
About this talk
Health taxes, which build on some of the oldest taxation measures in human society, open horizons in fiscal policy that are only starting to be identified and explored. In particular, health taxes facilitate the convergence of two of our most pressing unfinished agendas: SDG3 (“Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages”, including target 3.8, Universal Health Coverage) and SDG13 (“Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts”). In this talk, I will present reflections on the structure inherent in these two Sustainable Development Goals, and in current approaches to achieving them, and infer a set of desirable criteria for innovative policy agendas. An emerging discussion termed “planetary health” serves as an example.
About Professor Jeremy Lauer
Jeremy joined the University of Strathclyde in February 2020 as Professor of Management Science following a 25-year career (1995-2020) as an Economist with the World Health Organization (WHO). In 2017, Jeremy was asked to lead a project on health taxes at the WHO which resulted in a 2022 book, involving collaboration with over two dozen global experts, that was published by the WHO, Imperial College and World Scientific. “Health Taxes: Policy and Practice” was the first book on the economics of a health topic to published by the WHO with an endorsement by a global financial institution (The World Bank).
Prior to this, in 2016 Jeremy analysed the economics of fiscal space for health workforce expansion in lower- and lower-middle income countries, as well as the interactions between the health system and the economy, for the UN Secretary-General’s High-Level Commission on Health Employment and Economic Growth. In 2018 Jeremy was invited by Argentina to advise the G20 health ministers’ working group. Jeremy continues to accept speaking engagements at the United Nations General Assembly, and appeared as a key-note speaker at high-profile UNGA side events hosted, respectively, by Uruguay and India in 2022 and 2023.
Jeremy’s expertise includes economic evaluation, fiscal policies for health, ethics in global health, the macroeconomics of health and the health system, and the health workforce.
About the Bradford Hill seminars
The Bradford Hill seminar series is the principal series of The Cambridge Population Health Sciences Partnership, in collaboration with the PHG Foundation. This comprises the Departments of Public Health & Primary Care, MRC Biostatistics Unit and MRC Epidemiology Unit at the University of Cambridge, bringing together a multi-disciplinary partnership of academics and public health professionals. The Bradford Hill seminar programme of internationally recognised speakers covers topics of broad interest to our public health research community. It aims to transcend as well as connect the activities of our individual partners.
All are welcome at our Bradford Hill seminars.