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240 Fighting the Diseases of Poverty
According to those presuppositions, free markets are weak arrangementsforsocietalorganisation,andrequiredomineeringgovernment
intervention to secure tolerable performance. These collectivist presuppositionsarenowgenerallyrecognisedtohavebeenfalse,yetthey
still inform the WHO’s conduct.
The fourth stage examines the WHO’s guiding political and
bureaucratic incentives, which lead it to support the interventionist
agenda that prevails in the environmental and public health
bureaucracies of the Western social democracies.
The fifth stage explains that since the WHO was initially constituted
upon false presuppositions, securing improved performance
requires a re-constitution of the agency. Fundamentally, this means
that government ought to provide a supporting, and not a leading,
role in social and economic activities which generate health of a
people as one of their many outcomes.
Images of the WHO: smallpox and Mother Teresa
How are we to appraise the activities of the WHO? The WHO is a
large organisation with a presence throughout the world. Its headquarters
are in Geneva, and it also has six regional headquarters:
Brazzaville for Africa, New Delhi for Southeast Asia, Manila for the
Western Pacific, Cairo for the Eastern Mediterranean, Washington
for the Americas, and Copenhagen for Europe.
Its budget for 2006–07 calls for an expenditure of $3.185 billion,
distributed across 37 distinct line-items of activity, as shown in Table
1. Judging by its budget, about 31 per cent of the WHO’s activities
take place at its Geneva headquarters, another 28 per cent are distributed
among its six regional headquarters, and the remaining 41
per cent take place within individual countries throughout the
world.
Specific observations about some of these budgetary line items
will be offered later, but any effort to examine those line items in
great detail would quickly become mired in numerous complex
issues that could obscure an overall vision of the organisation.