ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how globalisation affects health in developing countries and explains why the impact of the global economy on access to healthcare in those countries requires global corrective measures. It analyses the development aid paradigm, and how the fight against AIDS has begun to change it. The chapter examines why access to essential healthcare is a human right creating national and transnational entitlements and argues that foreign assistance responding to these entitlements is not a matter of discretionary spending; it is a matter of meeting legal obligations. In the absence of an alternative domestic source of financing, reducing the aid-dependency of developing countries' health sectors simply means reducing health expenditure, which decreases access to healthcare for most of the population and in particular for poor and vulnerable groups. The ethical imperative of reducing aid-dependency is increasingly supported by well-intended voices from the so-called 'global South' as well as from the 'global North'.
