Adam Wagstaff: Celebrating a Full and Impactful Life

Abstract

Dr. Adam Wagstaff joined the World Bank in 1999 as a Lead Economist in the Bank’s principal research department, the Development Research Group. From 2009 until his passing on May 10, 2020, he led and managed the group’s research on the economics of health, education, and social protection as Research Manager of Human Development. At the time he joined the Bank, Adam was already a preeminent scholar in health economics with groundbreaking contributions to the conceptualization and measurement of equity in health and healthcare access. However, being a highly successful academic alone was not Adam’s goal. Instead, driven by his deep, lifelong commitment to improving the lives of the poor, he was passionate about putting his and others’ research into practice. He did so in many ways, all of which have profoundly and lastingly influenced health policy worldwide. Adam was instrumental in shaping strategic policy goals both in and outside the Bank. In the early 2000s, he was deeply involved in transitioning the Bank’s mission from a focus on monetary measures of poverty to a broader agenda that emphasizes human development and other non-monetary indicators of well-being. More recently, his work on the economic dividends of a healthy population helped shape the Bank’s Human Capital Project, which centers on health and education spending as high-yield investments. Adam was also a key contributor to the development of the healthrelated Millennium Development Goals, where he successfully championed the inclusion of equity. And he was critically involved in including, operationalizing, and tracking Universal Health Coverage as a Sustainable Development Goal—a concept firmly based on his seminal work on equity in healthcare access and financial protection in health. Adam also profoundly influenced the Bank’s country operations, staunchly advocating for evidence-based decision-making and the application of economic principles as a member of the Health and Social Protection Sector Boards and as a candid peer reviewer of many project proposals. An avid mentor who was gifted with exceptional clarity as a writer and outstanding wit as a presenter, Adam maximized the impact of his work by making it accessible to both technical and non-technical audiences that spanned colleagues, government officials, academics, and students alike. Even more important to him was to empower others to conduct their own research into health equity and financial protection. To this end, he developed publicly available databases and easy-to-operate software tools, taught their application across the globe, and initiated many scientific collaborations between researchers in lowand middleand high-income countries. Despite this strong commitment to practice, Adam remained a prolific writer of scientific papers, books, reports, and blogs throughout his career at the Bank, putting him among the top 20 most cited health economists in the world. Adam epitomized intellectual curiosity, rigor and excellence, a strong commitment to data and evidencebased decision-making, a passion for effective communication and knowledge sharing, and an impatience to get things done that is firmly rooted in the goal of improving the lives of those most in need. The profound health system and economic disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, which pose a particular threat to the again rising ranks of the poor, make these qualities and the goals of health equity and financial protection