Sreekanth Venkatamaran is an Associate Professor at Mahindra Ecole Centrale in India. Phillip Stevens is a SEANET (Southeast Asia Network for Development) Fellow and Director of Geneva Network. SEANET is a project of IDEAS.

This policy brief is a simplified version of the Geneva Network’s working paper titled “Are Free Trade Agreements bad for health? Quantifying the impact of FTAs on health outcomes”. The paper was originally published in August 2015 and can be found online at www.geneva-network.com.

Using statistical methods, the paper argues that free trade agreements (FTAs) have modest positive impacts on health outcomes in the countries that concluded them (measured in terms of infant mortality, life expectancy and deaths from non-communicable diseases).