ZOOM: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85312406441

ID de reunión: 853 1240 6441
Código de acceso: 535323

Abstract

The study of healthcare system development has been shaped almost entirely by the experience of the Global North. Existing scholarship concentrates on a small number of high-income countries, and the analytical, conceptual and empirical tools used for cross-national comparison reflect this bias. This presentation introduces the Global Historical Healthcare Systems Dataset (G2HSet), an original dataset covering 167 countries from 1880 to 2021, with around 30 indicators on timing, institutional design, financing, and entitlements at the moment of introduction and in the present. Drawing on this dataset, I offer a global and historical perspective on healthcare system development, with a focus on three dimensions: timing and entitlement at introduction, and development trajectories. First, I show that the timing of healthcare system introduction differs substantially between the Global North and Global South, with clear regional waves moving from Europe to Latin America, Asia, and Africa over more than a century. Second, I examine entitlement logics at introduction, showing that most systems began by covering specific population groups, with strong regional and temporal variation in which groups were first granted access. Third, I identify two divergent development trajectories after introduction: expansion of the original system (predominant in the Global North) and segmentation through the creation of parallel systems (predominant in the Global South). I conclude by presenting preliminary results on the global mapping of segmentation and its implications for population coverage and inequality in access to healthcare.