In recent years there has been growing attention to the potential economic benefits of improvements in population health. This is far from new: historically, one of the origins of the public health movement lies in the awareness that the prosperity of nations is partly dependent on the health of their populations. But this awareness has recently received a new stimulus from the publication in 2001 of the report of the WHO Commission on Macroeconomics and Health, which demonstrated that health improvement can be seen as a key strategy for income growth and poverty reduction in low- and middle-income countries (Commission.
