Holding powerful corporations accountable for their health impacts: are corporate rankings effective?

Abstract

Monitoring the behaviour of transnational corporations is an important public health priority given the many ways corporate actors negatively affect health. Such effects can be mitigated by defining standards of corporate behaviour and implementing regulations to prohibit and sanction harmful behaviour. However, in the past two decades, market signals and corporate scorecards are increasingly being used to incentivise corporate actors to behave in a socially responsible manner. Two examples of relevance to global health are the Access to Medicine Index and the Access to Nutrition Initiative's Global Index. However, this Viewpoint argues that these indices are flawed and could have the perverse effect of reinforcing the power and dominance of the biggest pharmaceutical and food companies, and undermining broader public interest efforts to hold such companies accountable and improve equitable access to healthy foods, medicines, and vaccines.