Congress

Panelists from different parts of the world will discuss their experience of how power manifests in research and policy engagements and what we as health economists can do to enable more equitable partnerships.  Issues will include the choice of topics for research funding, how research partnerships are designed and implemented, and how technical assistance for health policy is provided. Speakers will be invited to offer bold approaches to promoting greater diversity and inclusion across the field of health economics research and its application to policy.

Moderator: Kara Hanson

Kara is Professor of Health System Economics at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.  She has spent the last 30 years researching the economics of health systems in low- and middle-income countries.  Her major contributions are in the areas of health financing and the private health sector.  She chaired the recent Lancet Global Health Commission on Financing Primary Health Care, and has authored key publications on how strategic purchasing can help to improve health system performance.  Her work on the private sector has sought to understand the opportunities and limitations of using the private sector to extend access to critical public health interventions and, more recently, to the challenges of regulating healthcare markets. She advises national governments and international organisations on health system and financing issues.  Kara is President-Elect of IHEA and chairs the IHEA Equality, Diversity and Inclusion committee.  She holds degrees from McGill University, University of Cambridge and Harvard School of Public Health.

Panelists:

Edwine Barasa, KEMRI-Wellcome Trust, Nairobi, Kenya

Edwine is the director of the KEMRI-Wellcome Trust Nairobi Programme and heads the Programme’s Health Economics Research Unit (HERU). Edwine is also a visiting Professor of Health Economics at the University of Oxford. Edwine’s interests include health financing; equity and efficiency analysis in healthcare; economic evaluation of healthcare interventions; measuring health systems’ performance; and health system governance.

He provides health financing advisory inputs to the Kenya Ministry of Health, and to several international development organizations, including the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), focusing on the broader Sub-Saharan African region. He is a member of the advisory board of the Africa CDC’s Health Economic Unit, and a member of the Africa Universal Health Coverage Commission.

As a health economist based in the African continent, and a leader of a research organization, Edwine has been involved in multiple research collaborations that include Global South and North partners.

Robert Gillezeau

Rob is an Assistant Professor of Economic Analysis and Policy in the Department of Management and the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto Scarborough.  He is a Broadbent Institute fellow, co-director of the Canadian Economics Association’s Indigenous Economics Study Group, and a founding member of the Canadian Economics Diversity Committee.

His research focuses on the economic history of the Indigenous peoples of North America and the intersection of discrimination, protest, and state institutions.

Prior to his academic appointment, Rob served as the Chief Economist in the Office of the Leader of the Official Opposition in Ottawa. He has also served as the senior aide to the Minister of Finance and Deputy Premier of British Columbia.  He received his PhD in economics at the University of Michigan.

Eeshani Kandpal

Eeshani is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Development and was previously a Senior Economist in the Development Research Group of the World Bank. Her research aims to inform development policy to improve maternal and child outcomes including: the design and impacts of cash transfers to poor households; pay-for-performance contracts to improve health worker effort and the provision of maternal and child health care; and household-level determinants of investments in women’s human capital as well as the varied interactions between gender and social capital, such as the role of peer effects in intrahousehold decision-making.

Eeshani is an active member of the economics profession, serving as a mentor for several efforts to improve diversity in the profession, and is currently a member of IHEA’s Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion committee. She was born and raised in India and has a PhD from the University of Illinois and a BA from Macalester College.

Environmental crises, particularly climate change, have profound implications for the health of populations and health systems globally, with disproportionate impacts on low and middle-income countries.  The health sector itself contributes to climate change.  Yet, there has been very limited research by health economists to date on what is now widely regarded as one of the greatest threats to health.

This plenary is a call to action for health economists to recognize the severity of climate change consequences and respond.  It will include a keynote address by Professor Elizabeth Robinson, an environmental economist, who will explore the importance of economists engaging around climate change and related environmental crises.  Two health economists, Professors Martin Hensher and Josephine Borghi, will provide insights into how the discipline can incorporate climate change issues in their research, in a panel discussion, moderated by Professor Paula Lorgelly.

Moderator:

Paula Lorgelly

Paula is a Professor of Health Economics at the University of Auckland.  She is a recent Vice Chancellor’s strategic appointment, which is a joint post between the School of Population Health and the Department of Economics.  Paula has held academic and visiting positions in the UK, Australia and Germany.  Her return to New Zealand – the most isolated temperate land mass in the world – has made her acutely aware of climate change and our need to protect and conserve, kaitiakitanga.  Paula has previously explored how the societal perspective could include environmental impact and is currently supervising work looking at the carbon footprint of food purchasing behaviour.

Keynote speaker

Professor Elizabeth Robinson

Professor Elizabeth Robinson joined the Grantham Research Institute (GRI) on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science as its Director in September 2021.  She is an environmental economist with over twenty-five years’ experience undertaking research, particularly in lower-income countries, including six while living in Tanzania and Ghana, that focuses on climate change and systemic risk; and tracking the co-benefits of climate change mitigation and health, oriented particularly around food security and food systems.  She was on the UK Defra Economic Advisory Panel for five years; and in 2019-20, Specialist Advisor to the UK House of Lords Select Committee on Food, Poverty, Health, and Environment. She is currently Working Group 1 lead for the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change.  Elizabeth previously worked at the University of Reading, the Boston Consulting Group, the World Bank, Rockefeller Foundation, Natural Resources Institute, and the University of Oxford. She has a first-class degree in Engineering, Economics, and Management from Oxford University, and a PhD in Applied Economics from Stanford University.

Panelists

Martin Hensher

Martin Hensher is the Henry Baldwin Professorial Research Fellow in Health Systems Sustainability at the Menzies Institute for Medical Research of the University of Tasmania.  He has over thirty years’ global experience in health economics, planning and financing.  He was the senior economic adviser in the South African National Department of Health and in the Department of Health England, before moving to Australia where he spent seven years as a Director in the Tasmanian Department of Health.

Martin’s research focuses on integrating the economic, environmental, and societal dimensions of improving the sustainability of health care systems.  His work integrates health economics with ecological economics to answer questions including climate change mitigation and adaptation for healthcare systems; the future of healthcare in a post-growth economy; and overconsumption and diminishing marginal returns in healthcare.

Josephine Borghi 

Josephine Borghi is a Professor in Health Economics from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. Jo is co-convenor of IHEA’s Financing for Universal Health Coverage Special Interest group.  Jo’s research is focused on understanding how low- and middle-income country health systems respond to the incentives generated by different financing arrangements. Jo is especially interested in the potential for health financing arrangements to build health system resilience to climate and other shocks.  Jo spent her sabbatical in 2022 at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, with environmental economists in the Systemic Risk and Resilience group, to explore the interconnections between health and environmental systems and the potential transfer of methods between disciplines. Earlier this year, she organised a workshop on: “Financing climate and health risks – potential for a common approach”.