Making sense of dictatorships and health outcomes

This morning, the British Medical Journal: Global Health published my article with Benjamin Powell and Gilbert Berdine on how to make sense of health outcomes under dictatorships. The article is open access (here) and a summary is available below:

How should global health researchers and practitioners assess and make sense of improved health policy and outcomes under authoritarian and dictatorial regimes? In this editorial, we explained that it should not come as a surprise that some non-democratic regimes see some health indicators improve. Dictatorships excel at solving univariate problems. However, they tend to fail at dealing with the trade-offs associated with these solutions and on which such solutions often depend. These trade-offs are a lack of economic freedom which results in poverty and a lack of political freedom, both of which may ultimately have negative consequences on health outcomes.