how in the years after formerly colonized nations achieved independence, when the recently created World Bank offered loans to poor countries, the Bank’s policies profoundly shaped the healthcare systems in those countries. Restrictions on how much governments could spend and how they could spend it led to tragic underfunding of healthcare and education systems. “By the late 1980s,” Mukherjee tells us, “health budgets in many African and Asian countries were less than $5 per person per year.”
