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Changing the lives of very young children: Evidence from RwandaGlobally, around 250 million children under the age of five do not meet key development milestones, which reduces their ability to reach their full...
Globally, around 250 million children under the age of five do not meet key development milestones, which reduces their ability to reach their full...
Countering recent rises in many countries of inequality in income and wealth is widely recognized as a major development challenge. This is so from an ethical perspective and because greater inequality is perceived to be detrimental to key...
Although baseline data for post-conflict situations are frequently unavailable, there is a clear deterioration in the health conditions of populations during and following conflict. Excess mortality and morbidity, displaced populations, and...
Atmospheric emissions urgently need to reduce for natural gas to fulfill its potential role in the energy transition to achieve the Paris Agreement on climate change. This paper establishes the magnitude and trends of flaring and venting in oil and...
This second paper on hydrocarbon gas flaring and venting builds on our first, which evaluated the economic and social cost (SCAR) of wasted natural gas. These emissions must be reduced urgently for natural gas to meet its potential as an energy...
We implement a lab-in-the-field experiment among childcare workers in Chandigarh, India, to evaluate discriminatory attitudes of the Hindu workers toward Muslim children. We use a third-party allocation game that controls for selfish payoff...
Part of Book Social Mobility in Developing Countries
21 March 2013 In foreign aid, results are the buzz word of the day; evaluation, monitoring, and quality control are the means of demonstrating to...
17 October 2013 James Foster describes the importance of moving beyond income poverty as a way of assessing 'who is poor?' and 'how poor?'...
The United Nations sustainable development goal (SDG) 3 seeks “to ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all and at all ages”. To build healthcare systems that were able to progress towards the millennium development goals, many countries...
Part of Journal Special Issue Measuring quality of care
Part of Journal Special Issue Measuring quality of care
Part of Journal Special Issue Measuring quality of care
Part of Journal Special Issue Measuring quality of care
Part of Journal Special Issue Measuring quality of care
Part of Journal Special Issue Measuring quality of care
Part of Journal Special Issue Measuring quality of care
Part of Journal Special Issue Measuring quality of care
Part of Journal Special Issue Measuring quality of care
Part of Journal Special Issue Measuring quality of care
Can agricultural development programs improve health-related outcomes? We exploit a spatial discontinuity in the coverage of a large-scale agricultural extensionprogram in Uganda to causally identify its effects on malaria. We find that eligibility...
This paper tests using survey data from China whether individual health is associated with income and community-level income inequality. Although poor health and high inequality are key features of many developing countries, most of the earlier...
There is a dearth of evidence on the evolution of occupational health in the developing world and on the extent to which it has been influenced by (1) the pattern of structural transformation in these economies and (2) integration with global markets...
Nutritional status at a young age is positively associated with an individual’s total human capital accumulated. Higher levels of human capital are in turn strongly correlated with an individual’s economic and social well-being. Health is one such...
In this paper, we present new projections for a range of global poverty-related Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), specifically, extreme monetary poverty, undernutrition, stunting, child mortality, maternal mortality, and access to clean water and...
Improving the delivery of quality health services is messy! Vast amounts of knowledge and experience is being generated daily. We need to help capture...
The hypothesis that ethnic diversity has a negative impact on public goods provision is widely accepted. Notably, most work on this issue fails to distinguish adequately between national versus subnational governance. We find that subnational...
The rapid economic growth experienced within the past two decades in China highly correlates with childhood overweightness. The epidemic has become an issue of grave concern. A principal factor considered to be responsible for the epidemic in the...
The papers in this special issue were originally presented at a World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER) Conference on Health Equity in 2006. They look beyond the current literature in terms of measures of inequality, indicators...
This paper examines a broad range of opportunities for addressing the pressing human development needs of low-income countries by using new oil, gas, and mineral discoveries. It assesses how much of an impact can be made on the funding gaps for...
One-third of married women are sterilized in India. This is largely due to family planning programs that put a strong emphasis on ‘permanent’ contraceptive methods rather than temporary ones. However, little is known about potential adverse effects...
Primum non nocere — first, do no harm. This most basic tenet of medical care is routinely violated in clinics and hospitals around the world today...
The quality of care provided by health systems contributes towards efforts to reach sustainable development goal 3 on health and wellbeing. There is growing evidence that the impact of health interventions is undermined by poor quality of care in...
Official poverty figures in Uganda are flawed by the fact that the underlying poverty lines are based on a single national food basket that was constructed in the early 1990s. In this paper, we estimate a new set of poverty lines that accounts for...
Controversy over the aggregate impact of foreign aid has focused on reduced form estimates of the aid-growth link. The causal chain, through which aid affects developmental outcomes including growth, has received much less attention. We address this...
Malaria still claims a heavy human and economic toll, specifically in sub-Saharan Africa. Even though the causality between malaria and poverty is presumably bi-directional, malaria plays a role in the economic difficulties of the region. This...
The objectives of the study are three-fold: to investigate who are vulnerable to welfare loss from health shocks, what are the household responses to cope with the economic burden of health shocks and if policy responses like state health insurance...
Improvements in health-care quality can contribute to healthier populations. However, many global and national health strategies are not sufficiently considering the issues of measuring and improving health-care quality in lowresource settings. The...
Objective To develop a composite measure of primary care quality and apply it to Haiti’s primary care system. Methods Using the Primary Health Care Performance Initiative’s framework, we defined four domains of primary care service delivery: (i)...
Objective To evaluate the impact on the quality of the care provided for childhood diarrhoea and pneumonia in Bihar, India, of a large-scale, social franchising and telemedicine programme – the World Health Partners’ Sky Program. Methods We...
Objective To develop a novel measure to characterize human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) programme quality at health facilities in Kenya and explore its associations with patient- and facility-level characteristics. Methods We developed a composite...
Existing definitions and measurement approaches of quality of health care often fail to address the complexities involved in understanding quality of care. It is perceptions of quality, rather than clinical indicators of quality, that drive service...
Objective To evaluate the impact of a performance-based financing scheme on maternal and neonatal health service quality in Malawi. Methods We conducted a non-randomized controlled before and after study to evaluate the effects of district- and...
Objective To assess compliance with infection prevention and control practices in primary health care in Kenya. Methods We used an observational, patient-tracking tool to assess compliance with infection prevention and control practices by 1680...
Problem The lack of proper water and sanitation infrastructures and poor hygiene practices in health-care facilities reduces facilities’ preparedness and response to disease outbreaks and decreases the communities’ trust in the health services...
This paper explores the intergenerational effects of parental health shocks using longitudinal data from the Young Lives project conducted in Andhra Pradesh, India. It is found that health shocks to poorer parents reduce investments in children...
It is widely accepted in recent work in economics and political science that ethnic diversity has a negative impact on the provision of public goods...
The study examines the relationship between climatic factors and reported malaria cases using data from 12 districts in Uganda over the period 2000-2011. A panel dataset comprising temperature, temperature standard deviation; minimum humidity...
This paper describes approaches to the measurement and explanation of income-related inequality and inequity in health care financing, health care utilization and health and considers the applicability and the feasibility of these methods in low...
Public policy debates, about HIV and prevention policy, have tended to occupy one of two extreme positions derived from either rational choice and or structuralists theories. This paper argues that the concept of hope may offer a way through this...
The paucity of non-agricultural paid employment, and under utilization of female labour in Uganda, and other sub-Saharan African countries, is often seen to be the next major obstacle to further poverty reduction and development in the region...
This paper examines the impact of the transition to a market economy on health and education outcomes in transitional Asia, with particular focus on the case of Vietnam. After examining a variety of empirical evidence, several lessons emerge. First...
The first part of the paper describes steps which Tanzania took in order to provide key social services to her people. Tanzania made great efforts within the ujamaa socialist system to provide free social services for rural as well as urban people...
From the book: Oxford Handbook of Africa and Economics, Vol. 2.
From the book: Oxford Handbook of Africa and Economics, Vol. 2.
This paper aims to assess the impact that the impoverishment process has had on IPD health dynamics and micronutrient-related morbidity via the changes which have occurred in food consumption in terms of average intake, its distribution and the...
Radical and simultaneous economic reforms were implemented in many developing countries, especially in Africa, Asia and Latin America in the 1980s and early 1990s. Many of these reforms - structural adjustment programmes - were implemented with...
This paper examines the effects of health-oriented food tax reforms on the distribution of tax payments, food demand and health outcomes. We offer an illustration of how one can take into account the uncertainty related to both demand estimation and...
This paper looks at the prospects of a demographic dividend in Africa in the near future. While acknowledging that the fertility declines which change population age structures and thus dependency ratios have been slow to begin and often seem to have...
Several large-scale efforts have been made to combat malaria in the last decade under the Millennium Development Goals, and while these have led to a...
The paper reviews the theoretical basis for the application of user fees in the public health sector in low-income countries with particular reference to the special characteristics of medical care as a commodity. The general equilibrium efficiency...
Like many African countries, Kenya is vulnerable to avian flu given its position along migratory bird routes and proximity to other high risk countries. This raises concern about the effect of an outbreak on rural livelihoods. We use a dynamic...
Economic research on labour migration in the developing world has traditionally focused on the role played by the remittances of overseas migrant labour in the sending country’s economy. Recently, due in no small part to the availability of rich...
We present a unified structural equation modelling framework for the regression-based decomposition of rank-dependent indicators of socioeconomic inequality of health and compare it with a simple ordinary least squares regression. The structural...
This paper discusses the main changes in infant, child and maternal mortality which have occurred over 1960-1995 in Sub-Saharan Africa and analyses the main factors responsible for the observed shifts in these health trends. To do so, the paper...
This paper examines the short- and long-term determinants of the mortality due to cardiovascular diseases (CVD) among the working-age population in Russia. Why Russia? Why CVD mortality? Why the working-age population? Russia is the Eastern European...
Parental human capital and endowments may affect children’s human capital, which in turn may affect children’s earning and occupations and thus affect social mobility. This paper focuses on what we know about these possible links in low- and middle...
This study aims to examine the drivers of inequality of opportunity in health outcome among children below 5 years of age, using the Sudanese 2014 Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey. It investigates the variation in inequality across and within...
The consequences of health professional mobility have become a prominent public policy concern. This paper considers trends in mobility amongst doctors and nurses and the consequences for health systems. Policy responses are shifting from a reactive...
This paper investigates the extent to which the decline in child mortality over the last three decades can be attributed to economic growth. In doing this, it exploits the considerable variation in growth over this period, across states and over time...