As the world prepares to celebrate World Health Day on April 7, governments’ failure to invest adequate resources or appropriate budgetary support in public healthcare systems undermines the right to health for many people around the world.

Forthcoming Human Rights Watch analysis of the most recent available data in the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Global Health Expenditure Database shows that most governments spent less than 5 percent of their Gross Domestic Product (GDP) or 15 percent of their national budget on health care in 2021. These two benchmarks are largely accepted spending targets in public health care.

Even amid the massive surge in global healthcare spending in 2020-2021, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, 80 percent of the world’s population lived in countries that met neither spending benchmark. Indeed, when adjusted for inflation, 41 countries saw real-term declines in their per capita public healthcare spending between 2019 and 2021, despite the fact that most of them actually experienced an increase in GDP per capita in the same period.