Has Global Health Been Rigorously Compared With Other Cause Areas?

Hi James! There's actually a variety of EA-aligned charities in those areas. Some that come to mind:

• Teaching at the Right Level (Education)
• NOVAH No Violence At Home (women's domestic abuse prevention)
• ACTRA (reducing criminality in Central America)
• Africa Jobs Fund (economic growth)
• Lafiyah Nigeria (contraceptives provision, so women's empowerment)

They all have their own theories as to why they might be unusually effective.

As for why:

• The differing moral priorities about saving a life versus improving a life. You sound like you'd be more on board with the moral prioritisation of the Happier Lives Institute rather than GiveWell, so do check them and their recommendations out.
• Global health really has a huge funding gap. So it's quite easily to find something that works effectively - you take a working preventative (e.g. malaria nets, chemoprevention, vaccines, vitamin supplements) and you put cash towards incentivising it / tackle supply-side issues. There's just a lot that can be done in this space in ways that replicate. It's quite easy to get into. A lot of other intervention types are just a lot fiddlier.
• The richer a country is, the more arguments there are that effective interventions helping citizens within it should be funded by its government. To be clear, EAs still definitely work on this stuff! But they tend to bid for government funding pots, not for effective giving money, so you hear about them less.

You may be interested to know that GiveWell didn’t start out as a GHD evaluator. The initial idea was to evaluate many different cause areas, including economic opportunity and education. But I think what happened is that once they had compiled the research, donors saw that the GHD stuff was like 10,000× more cost effective, so the other cause areas didn’t attract much money moved and in 2012 they shut the other cause areas down. 2009 was the year GiveWell discovered AMF, and other than that, their 2009 top charities list is pretty unrecognizable.

I think this is an important question more people should be thinking about (particularly if one believes that there is going to be a significant increase in philanthropic funding due to AI money).

Rather than refer to research I can write about my personal reasons/takes:

I primarily work in global health (and AI safety), and my main reason for doing so is:
measurability: it's possible to measure the impact of global health projects fairly rigorously, compared to democracy promotion or economic growth. Additionally, many global health problems are probably just more tractable compared to various issues you noted (e.g. tackling corruption or improving international coordination or improving democracy). Nonetheless, something being less tractable and measurable doesn't mean you shouldn't work on it. Still, if you care about impact attribution, global health is likely to be better than many other "near-termist" areas you can compare it to (due to an existing high-quality evidence base, ease of organizing RCTs etc.)

That said, I believe global health delivery (e.g. charities delivering a particular drug, or service) projects seem to dominate EA's global development portfolio. 

My impression is that, the primary reason for this overconcentration is global health delivery being more measurable compared to economic growth, health systems strengthening and other things. 

I believe that (influential) EAs overindex on measurability in global development, and there should be more funding, labour and attention going into global development projects that have a "worse measurability profile". But I think this is part of a broader issue of EA community having surprisingly weak infrastructure (besides Probably Good) for helping/incentivizing people to think about career/issue prioritization within global development (or more politics-flavored issues).

Also I’m not sure if anyone specifically in the EA space is working on it yet, but there is a case for government e-procurement development in low & middle income countries saving a lot of money & reducing corruption.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-benefit-cost-analysis/article/investment-case-for-egovernment-procurement-a-costbenefit-analysis/1BC5D35109D488269F4C8F3E95C0B714

But it is still dependent on like a Minister of Finance & others willing to implement it & reduce the corruption in their domain.