Economic policy and public health: Insights from the history of the Canadian Journal of Public Health

Abstract

The nearly 115-year history of the Canadian Journal of Public Health (CJPH) provides an important opportunity to reflect on and learn from our past. In response to an invitation to members of the CJPH Editorial Board to curate historical articles around a theme, we undertook a historical examination of our field’s engagement, as gleaned through the pages of CJPH, with economic policy. This was inspired by the now well-established connections among political economic policy, population well-being, and health equity. Our analysis of six historical volumes (1917, 1933, 1941, 1961, 1995, and 2013) led to three key findings. First, we found only a slim historical foundation for public health engagement with the economy overall. Second, we observed a strong and seemingly subconscious allegiance to dominant economic paradigms, despite their incompatibility with root causes of health inequities. Third, even though socio-economic inequalities in health are a long-standing preoccupation of CJPH authors, those inequalities are consistently and curiously divorced from their roots in political economic systems. Our findings provide a historical foundation for thinking about how our public health community could be encouraged to engage constructively towards an economic system that supports, rather than obstructs, population well-being and health equity.