Morning Briefing

In this post in the Center for Global Development's (CGD) "Global Health Policy" blog, David Roodman, a research fellow at CGD, writes about "the debate on whether health is 'fungible,' i.e., whether giving money to governments to spend on health leads them to cut their own funding for [the] same, thereby effectively siphoning health aid into other uses." He writes, "Two years ago, a team of authors mostly affiliated with the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) in Seattle concluded in the Lancet (gated) that health aid has been highly fungible," but "two physician-scholars at Stanford have reanalyzed IHME's data in PLoS Medicine (quite ungated) and judged the Lancet findings to be spuriously generated by bad and/or extreme data points." Roodman notes that he is continuing to analyze data from both studies and plans to "get to the bottom of the latest research on health aid fungibility" (5/14).