Socialist Health: of Shortages. An Introduction

Although Kornai has been criticised by political economists like Christopher Davis for not including complex and non-conventional sectors such as the medical system in his analysis, Kornai's overall work, particularly his book Economics of Shortage was, and continues to be, hugely influential in understanding state-socialist planning economies, and has significantly shaped economic theories.2Indeed, the West perceived the socialist world through tropes of shortage: of basic necessities, consumer products, and provisions for health.Shortage became a cornerstone of Cold War rhetoric, contrasted with the abundance of the West's market economy and healthcare.Shortages were, of course, a reality that permeated everyday life, scientific research and medical practice in state-socialist countries, sometimes paired with planned or accidental abundance in expertise and medical goods.The rest of the world was not immune either: local and regional shortages were often nested in global scarcities, in which the interests of East and West would either align or clash.The Cold War politics of access to antibiotics and pharmaceutical technologies in the immediate postwar era, or the fluctuation between collaboration and competition when it came to respiratory devices and newly developed vaccines in global polio outbreaks point to the manifold ways in which real and perceived shortages and inequalities played out within and between countries.3Decolonising states with their contested status in the international health system, and facing grave material, administrative and personnel shortages, became promising targets for aid from both sides.Aid and development have always been at the heart of histories of global health, as its story weaves a narrative arc from philanthropic organizations such as the Rockefeller Foundation, through technical assistance programmes, postcolonial developmentalism and modernization projects, to philanthrocapitalism in the twentieth century.It is an incredibly rich history that has seen exciting turns in the recent years, such as Latin American challenges and enactments of developmentalist models.4If the socialist world