Global health futures?

Susan Erikson

doi:10.17157/mat.6.3.664

Abstract

Since 2010, there has been a discernable expansion of global health financing forms using private equity, bonds, and ‘facilities’ to finance international development and humanitarian endeavors. I present the logics of the Pandemic Emergency Facility (PEF), a World Bank device that lashes together a bond, cash, and swaps to lie in reserve for an infectious disease outbreak. I explain how the PEF is emblematic of financial devices that have the potential to fund global health aid while offering investors a chance to make money. Reckoning with the pandemic bond means that we take account not only of the PEF (what does it organize and by what logics?) but also of the relationships it cultivates (what does it bind together?) and reproduces (what does it aim to multiply and what does it forsake?). I use ‘reckoning with’ as an analytic concept to help us think about measures and futures of global health in both economic and ethical registers, as well as to take account of how death data is used. Reckoning with something lets us pause to take account of where we are and where we are going, and helps us think about what we want. Is it necessary to translate the ethical obligation to help those who are suffering into financial devices that make people money, a trend we are clearly in the initial stages of? Are there conditions when the suffering of others as the source of financial speculation becomes desirable?

Highlights

Since 2010, there has been a discernable expansion of global health financing forms using private equity, bonds, and ‘facilities’ to finance international development and humanitarian endeavors
The devices are complex and born of multiple and competing interests and perspectives. They force a reckoning: If money for pandemic emergency response is not otherwise available, should investors be able to make money speculating on pandemics? What does pandemic investability mean for our collective health futures?
As part of my research on the financialization of global health, I reckon with these questions through the emergence of the ‘pandemic bond’, which is the money-making part of the World Bank’s Pandemic Emergency Facility (PEF), a financial device designed to provide money for pandemics

Summary

What is the PEF?

With the PEF, the World Bank brings together more than sixty diverse groups to frontload money for quick future disbursement if a qualifying pandemic occurs in any of the seventyseven International Development Association (IDA) countries, deemed the world’s poorest by the World Bank. The bond part of the PEF launched in July 2017 when twenty-six investors bought into a three-year bond designed to raise US$320 million for pandemic response Investors give their money to the World Bank to hold for three years. If there is a pandemic during those three years, the World Bank (2019, 3) gives some of the investors’ money to ‘responding agencies’ to administer emergency care: PEF funds can be used to finance the cost of response efforts during an outbreak, in line with what is described in the country response plan. In June 2014, as the Ebola pandemic raged, the World Bank had just issued its first cat bond, raising US$30 million, covering earthquakes and cyclones in sixteen Caribbean countries.

Making what global health becomes

Dead reckoning

Last modified

Findings

Securities and Exchange