[The economics of health care in developing countries: what the fight against the AIDS epidemics has changed].

Since the start of the new century, development aid targeted on health care has seen an unprecedented rise, driven by the fight against AIDS. This article shows how this struggle has been accompanied with a renewal of the economic paradigms governing international action in favour of health care in developing countries: the idea that an improvement in health care constitutes an unavoidable prerequisite to macroeconomic growth, rather than a consequence; the insistence on the founding of mechanisms for health insurance to finance the costs of health care, rather than covering the costs at the point of use by the health care users; a concern to impose price differentials for access to medicine in developing countries, and to introduce flexibility in the regulation of international intellectual property law; the priority to vertical programmes targeted on certain illnesses, thought to act as levers for a global reinforcement of health care systems. This article discusses the pertinence of these new paradigms in light of the evolution of the AIDS/HIV epidemic, and the international context.