Correcting Market and Government Failures in Tackling the Global Growth of Type 2 Diabetes: Application of WHO's Common Goods for Health Approach.

Abstract

Following the global health challenge of Ebola, the World Health Organization (WHO) developed a new approach to prioritizing health policy actions when both markets and government fail. The new approach, Common Goods for Health (CGH), is applied in this paper to identify priority actions to tackle failures in addressing the increasing prevalence of type 2 diabetes globally. National governments could realistically implement these actions to efficiently and equitably reduce the prevalence of type 2 diabetes, a non-communicable disease that is growing in every region of the world. The paper identifies three broad categories of CGH actions: (i) earlier risk identification; (ii) better communication for behavior change; and (iii) reforming tax/subsidy policies on food.