ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on health as one of the few hard indicators and discusses the impacts of globalisation on the quality of life of individuals. It shows how global economic forces are shaping health and health care and the progress geographers have made in examining these relationships. Globalisation describes a process by which the social, the political, and the economic spread across space in new and faster ways creating interconnections that transcend national borders. Globalisation in its current capacity emerged out of the economic glut of the 1970s. Neoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework. The process of health care liberalisation was instituted in many low-income countries as a necessary component of International Monetary Fund (IMF) loans and was adopted voluntarily in developed countries beginning in the 1980s under the rubric of restructuring.
