Key words: health, workforce, Covid-19, international cooperation, cosmopolitanism, economic globalization

"A cosmopolitan outlook on health workforce development"

Over the last few decades, global health workforce inequalities have increased. The covid-19 pandemic indicates how essential health care workers are to protect societal health and economies.  This thesis takes a cosmopolitan outlook, to study what is required to develop the global health workforce in an equitable manner. It looks into principles and policies of global health governance to assess what has been done to strengthen the health workforce and how to govern health labour migration while respecting human rights. It shows that there is a paradox in economic globalization, which leads to a structural problem to invest in the health workforce at the national level. Overcoming this ‘gridlock’ requires that countries take a shared sovereignty approach and find ways to regulate economic globalization so that it benefits the public good rather than the wealth of a few.