Seminar

Malaria is, with TB and HIV/AIDS, one of the big three global killers of the world's poorest people. It is highly debilitating, causing loss of labour productivity and reduced educational attainment by children, leading to enormous economic, as well as health, consequences. Drug resistance is rendering older cheaper drugs useless. New Artemisinin Combination Therapy (ACT) is effective but (relatively) expensive for low income countries, where many malarial treatments are being purchased by poor people out of their own pockets. What can the international community do to ensure cost-effective use of ACT? Even if the commitment to subsidise is there, how can this be effected in an informal health economy? What happens when drug resistance to ACT develops?

Professor Arrow studied at Columbia and conducted research at the Cowles Commission for Research in Economics at Chicago before becoming a Professor of Economics at Stanford. He moved to Harvard (1968-79) and then back to Stanford where he is now Professor Emeritus. He won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics with John Hicks in 1972 for his work on general economic equilibrium theory and welfare theory. He has been a Fellow at Churchill College, University of Cambridge, and Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, University of Oxford. He is a member of many associations including the British Academy and the American Economic Association (of which he is Distinguished Fellow and past President).

His research, mostly deals with information as an economic variable, both as to its production and as to its use. Two 1962 papers studied the efficiency with which the market encourages innovation and the implications of learning by doing for economic growth. In 1963 and later papers, he pointed out that the special market characteristics of medical care and medical insurance could be explained by reference to differences in information among the parties involved. This paper provided the intellectual underpinnings for health economics as a discipline.

Professor Arrow was introduced by Professor Sir Richard Peto, who set out the biomedical context of malaria. Professor Peto is Professor of Medical Statistics and Epidemiology at the University of Oxford. A Fellow of the Royal Society, he set up the Clinical Trial Services Unit in Oxford in 1975 and is currently co-director. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1989 for his contributions to the development of meta-analysis and was knighted for services to epidemiology and to cancer prevention in 1999. He served with Professor Arrow on the IoM Committee.