Commercial Determinants of Health

Research - Portfolios - Commercial Determinants of Health Diagram
A handful of industries drive a large share of the world's ill health — through the products they sell and the tactics they use to protect them. We expose how commercial power shapes health, and work to hold it to account.

Summary

Much of today's burden of disease is shaped by the practices of powerful commercial actors — the tobacco, alcohol, ultra-processed food, fossil-fuel and other industries — and by the marketing, lobbying, litigation and framing they use to defend profit at the expense of health. Understanding these commercial determinants of health means following not just the products, but the power: how industries shape the rules, the evidence and the choices available to the rest of us. A second, related strand asks how public bodies should — and should not — engage with the commercial sector: the governance of public–private partnerships, the rules of engagement, and the management of conflicts of interest. Equity stays in view throughout: who profits, who pays, and how the balance can be shifted.

The topic is led by Dr Neil Sircar and Dr Shashika Bandara — bringing together tobacco control and public-health law, the political economy of health-harming products, and global health governance — with Professor Kent Buse and the wider Department. The Department's work here is both foundational and current: Professor Buse helped establish the early scholarship on global public–private health partnerships, designed principles and criteria for engaging the commercial sector for a variety of global institutions, and mapped the commercial sector's role in global health governance for WHO. More recently, he was commissioned by WHO to write the chapter on commercial determinants of health for its 2025 World Report on Social Determinants of Health Equity, and has served on several WHO informal expert groups in this area (for example on developing guidance for member states).