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
Blog
Reorientating the Results Based Agenda: Interviews by Carl-Gustav Lindén
by
Carl-Gustav Lindén
March 2013
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...
Blog
Multidimensional Poverty: Measurement and Implications: An Interview with James Foster
by
Roger Williamson
October 2013
17 October 2013 James Foster describes the importance of moving beyond income poverty as a way of assessing 'who is poor?' and 'how poor?'...
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...
Blog
Measuring outpatient safety at scale: infection prevention and control practices in Kenya
by
Guadalupe Bedoya, Jishnu Das
June 2017
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...
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...
Blog
Building the learning agenda: Spotlight on the Global Learning Laboratory for Quality Universal Health Coverage
by
Nana Mensah Abrampah
June 2017
Improving the delivery of quality health services is messy! Vast amounts of knowledge and experience is being generated daily. We need to help capture...
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...
Blog
Diversity debit vs. diversity dividend: Challenging the conventional wisdom
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...
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...
Blog
Income generation and malaria in Uganda
by
Saurabh Singhal, Yao Pan
December 2017
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...
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...
Working Paper
Health Status and Health Policy in Sub-Saharan Africa
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...
Working Paper
Short- and Long-Term Determinants of Cardiovascular Mortality
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...
Book Chapter
The Prospects for an Imminent Demographic Dividend in Africa
From the book: Oxford Handbook of Africa and Economics, Vol. 2.
Book Chapter
The Economics of Malaria
From the book: Oxford Handbook of Africa and Economics, Vol. 2.
Working Paper
A (time) series of unfortunate events: structural change, globalization, and the rise of occupational injuries
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...
Working Paper
Looking ahead to COP27—from climate pledges to action
The global energy transition is happening, but too slowly to limit climate change to acceptable levels, for diverse reasons. Carbon emissions policies and measures focus too little on absolute emission targets and too much on relative measures such...
Working Paper
Politics, policies, and the effectiveness of foreign aid in fragile states
International development cooperation has evolved since the 1960s. The effectiveness of aid is still topical, but studies have not paid adequate attention to the relationship between sectoral aid, politics, institutions, and aid effectiveness in...
Blog
Is a strong middle class the secret to high levels of human development?
by
David Castells-Quintana, Carlos Gradín, Vicente Royuela
April 2023
Many countries today experience increasing or persistent income inequality, a major concern for citizens and politicians alike. This concern is...
Working Paper
Growth and inequality convergence: the role of environmentally related impacts on human capital
We examine inequality convergence over the past three decades and ask if environmentally related impacts on health, and their effect on human capital, are responsible for the slow rate of inequality reduction in countries. Though higher initial...
Working Paper
Differential health reporting error among older adults in India
This paper studies the education gradient associated with health reporting errors for two highly prevalent non-communicable diseases among older adults in India. We leverage a novel data set—the Longitudinal Aging Study in India (2017–18) panel...
Working Paper
Health and ethnic inequalities in Mozambique with special reference to leprosy
The subject of this paper is health and ethnic inequalities in Mozambique, with special reference to leprosy. It is argued that the health policies and strategies adopted in the colonial and post-colonial periods led to an unequal distribution not...
Working Paper
The COVID-19 pandemic and the state in Bihar
This paper presents a critical analysis of official data related to COVID-19 in Bihar state, India, which points to the manipulation of data for political ends. The ruling party’s claim that the state managed the COVID pandemic brilliantly seems more...
Working Paper
Rehabilitating Health Systems in Post-Conflict Situations
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...
Working Paper
Two decades of Tanzanian health policy
Tanzania has undertaken important health sector reforms in the new millennium, and the most recent Health Sector Strategic Plan (2021–26) lays out ambitious targets to achieve universal health coverage. Yet, women in Tanzania continue to face...
Journal Article
On the impact of inequality on growth, human development, and governance
Inequality is a major international development challenge. This is so from an ethical perspective and because greater inequality is perceived to be detrimental to key socioeconomic and political outcomes. Still, informed debate requires clear...
Journal Article
Searching for religious discrimination among childcare workers
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...
Working Paper
Putting It All Together
School-feeding is an important intervention to attract children to school and augment their learning. The benefits of school-feeding cover several domains. Key to the overall assessment of these benefits is understanding how different implementation...
Working Paper
Unpacking Women’s Health in Public-Private Partnerships
There has been a significant increase in funding for health programmes in development over the last two decades, partly due to the formation of public-private partnerships. This paper examines the impact of public-private partnerships from the...
Journal Article
Inferring the economic standard of living and health from cohort height
Average adult height is a physical measure of the biological standard of living of a population. While the biological and economic standards of living of a population are very different concepts, they are linked and may empirically move together. If...
Blog
Economic Lessons from Recent Research for Achieving SDG8
This article is part of UNU’s “17 Days, 17 Goals” series, featuring research and commentary in support of the United Nations Sustainable Development...
Blog
From the Editor's Desk (September-October 2015)
UNU-WIDER had a busy September. We celebrated our 30th birthday with some 600 people at our three-day conference on ‘Mapping the Future of Development...
Working Paper
A Review of External Assistance and Aid Effectiveness for Maternal and Child Health
This paper primarily focuses on how global funding has supported interventions that have proven to be successful in reducing maternal, newborn, and child mortality around the world. The growth rate of development assistance targeted towards these...
Book Chapter
Interrelationships among Health, Environmental Quality, and Economic Activity
This chapter examines the link between health indicators, environmental variables, and economic development, and the consequences of this relationship on economic convergence. In the early stage of economic development, the gain from income growth...
Working Paper
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...