Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Despite increasing evidence on health inequalities over the past decades, efforts are still urgently needed to strengthen capacities to produce locally-relevant evidence on this topic, to inform interventions aiming to address them. To strengthen these research capacities, firstly, comprehensive understanding of the research production process, including its determinants and mechanisms involved, is vital. A number of conceptual frameworks exist that provide valuable, yet limited, advancements in these areas.

Through a critical review we developed a novel conceptual model that integrates social determinants of health and political economy perspectives, to provide a comprehensive understanding of how health inequalities research and research capacities are likely to be produced (or inhibited) at country level, and what they consist of, in terms of the components, pathways and determinants involved.

Our model represents a global hypothesis on this process and can serve as a heuristic tool to guide assessments of the determinants and relations that might be relevant to better understand the health inequalities research production process at national level, globally.

We encourage researchers and decision-makers to apply our model, to develop comprehensive health inequalities research capacities assessments and establish entry points to strengthen the evidence base, to inform interventions to achieve health equity.