David B. Evans

David B. Evans, Ph.D., is an economist by training. Between 1980 and 1990, he was an academic, first in economics departments and then in a medical school, during which time he undertook consultancies for the World Bank, the World Health Organization, and governments. From 1990 until 1998, he sponsored and conducted research into social and economic aspects of tropical diseases and their control in the United Nations Children's Fund, United Nations Development Programme, World Bank, and World Health Organization Special Programme on Research and Training in Tropical Diseases. He subsequently became director of the Global Programme on Evidence for Health Policy and then the Department of Health Systems Financing of the World Health Organization, where he is now responsible for a range of activities relating to the development of appropriate health financing strategies and policies. These activities include the World Health Organization's CHOICE project, which has assessed and reported the costs and effectiveness of more than 700 health interventions, the costs of scaling up interventions, the levels of health expenditures and accounts, and the extent of financial catastrophe and impoverishment caused by out-of-pocket payments for health and which has assessed the impact of different ways to raise funds for health, pool them, and use them to provide or purchase services and interventions. He has published widely in these areas.