Journal Special Issue
Measuring quality of care
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...
Journal Article
Quality of care
Part of Journal Special Issue
Measuring quality of care
Working Paper
Choices for spending government revenue
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...
Working Paper
Health consequences of sterilizations
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...
Working Paper
Quality of care
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...
Working Paper
Ethnic Heterogeneity and Public Goods Provision in Zambia
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...
Working Paper
Fast-Food Consumption and Child Body Mass Index in China
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...
Working Paper
The Economics of Malaria in Africa
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...
Working Paper
Health Shocks and Coping Strategies
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...
Journal Article
The Welfare Effects of Health-based Food Tax Policy
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...
Working Paper
The Prospects for an Imminent Demographic Dividend in Africa
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...
Journal Special Issue
Health and Development
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...
Working Paper
Changes in Climatic Factors and Malaria in Uganda
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...
Journal Article
Improving health-care quality in resource-poor settings
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...
Journal Article
Assessing the quality of primary care in Haiti
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)...
Journal Article
Evaluation of a social franchising and telemedicine programme and the care provided for childhood diarrhoea and pneumonia, Bihar, India
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...
Journal Article
Nurse-led HIV services and quality of care at health facilities in Kenya, 2014–2016
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...
Journal Article
Understanding and measuring quality of care
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...
Journal Article
Implementation research to improve quality of maternal and newborn health care, Malawi
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...
Journal Article
Observations of infection prevention and control practices in primary health care, Kenya
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...
Journal Article
Improving water, sanitation and hygiene in health-care facilities, Liberia
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...
Working Paper
Health shocks and the intergenerational transmission of inequality
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...
Working Paper
Consumption Bundle Aggregation in Poverty Measurement
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...
Book Chapter
Aid Effectiveness
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...
Working Paper
Health Effects of Market-Based Reforms in Developing Countries
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...
Working Paper
Economic Shocks, Impoverishment and Poverty-Related Mortality during the Eastern European Transition
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...
Working Paper
User Charges for Health Care
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...
Working Paper
Provision of Health Care and Education in Transitional Asia
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...
Working Paper
Community and Village-Based Provision of Key Social Services
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...
Journal Article
Consequences of Avian Flu for Growth and Poverty
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...
Working Paper
Labour migration in Indonesia and the health of children left behind
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...
Working Paper
A Unified Structural Equation Modelling Approach for the Decomposition of Rank-Dependent Indicators of Socioeconomic Inequality of Health
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...