Working Paper
Poor Health Reporting
Researchers often rely on household survey data to investigate health disparities and the incidence and prevalence of illness. These self-reported health measures are often biased due to information asymmetry or differences in reference groups. Using...
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
Sharing in Community-based Social Services in Rural Tanzania
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...
Working Paper
Unemployment, Labour Policies and Health in Transition
A sharp rise in unemployment and a sharp rise in mortality have been two recurrent aspects of the process of transition. In response to the unemployment challenge transitional economies have equipped themselves with labour market policies (LMPs)...
Working Paper
The Transition's Mortality Crisis in East Germany
Several studies have indicated an increase in men's mortality in East Germany between 1989 and 1991 in the wake of the reunification of 1990. For some age-groups, death rates soared by up to thirty per cent. This study investigates the evolution and...
Working Paper
The Role of Civic Organizations in the Provision of Social Services
In recent years churches, NGOs and community associations, commonly referred to as civic organizations, have been playing an increasing role in the provision of social services in response to fiscal stress, state inefficiency and an ideological...
Working Paper
The Scale and Nature of International Donor Assistance to Housing, Basic Services and Other Human-Settlements Related Projects
This paper describes the scale and nature of development assistance to projects that sought to improve housing and living conditions for low income groups, including housing-related infrastructure and services such as water supply, sanitation and...
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
Does project-level aid for water and sanitation improve child health outcomes?
Empirical studies on the effectiveness of aid to the water, sanitation, and hygiene sector (WASH aid) have focused primarily on access to these services as the benchmark for evaluating the effectiveness of aid in this sector. Given the importance of...
Working Paper
Residual capacity and the political economy of pandemic response in Ghana
On the whole, poor countries in Africa and elsewhere seem to have weathered the coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2, or COVID-19) pandemic better than wealthier countries with superior healthcare systems. Using the Ghanaian case, this paper draws on newspaper...
Working Paper
Dynamic impacts of lockdown on domestic violence
We leverage staggered implementation of lockdown across Chile’s 346 municipalities, identifying dynamic impacts on domestic violence. Using administrative data, we find lockdown imposition increases indicators of distress related to domestic violence...
Research Brief
What do we need to know about social mobility in the Global South?
The volume, Social Mobility in Developing Countries: Concepts, Methods and Determinants, brings together leading scholars from several disciplines to advance research practice on social mobility. Three sets of motivations guide this joint effort...
Working Paper
Does HIV/AIDS matter for economic growth in sub-Saharan Africa?
Estimating the impact of HIV/AIDS epidemic on economic growth is challenging because of endogeneity concerns. In this paper, we use novel data on male circumcision and distance from the first HIV outbreak as instrumental variables for the HIV/AIDS...
Working Paper
Social Spending and Aggregate Welfare in Developing and Transition Economies
Notwithstanding the unprecedented attention devoted to reducing poverty and fostering human development via scaling up social sector spending, there is surprisingly little rigorous empirical work on the question of whether social spending is...
Working Paper
Effectiveness of International Aid for Diarrheal Disease Control and Potential for Future Impact
The reduction in deaths from diarrheal diseases is one of the significant public health successes of the twentieth century. That said, the disease still accounts for a significant burden of childhood morbidity and mortality in low- and middle-income...
Working Paper
What Do We Know About Non-Clinical Interventions for Preventable and Treatable Childhood Diseases in Developing Countries?
Preventable and treatable childhood diseases, notably acute respiratory infections and diarrhoeal diseases are the first and second leading causes of death and morbidity among young children in developing countries. The fact that a large proportion...
Working Paper
The World Bank’s Health Projects in Timor-Leste
The World Bank’s health sector projects in Timor-Leste—the Health Sector Rehabilitation and Development Project and the Second Health Sector Rehabilitation and Development Project—have been among the few successful operations it has funded in that...
Working Paper
Global Collective Action in Health
This paper discusses shifts in development assistance for health (DAH) since 1990, analyses the nature of the current distribution of funding, and considers future implications. Based on Jamison et al. (1998) and Frenk and Moon (2013), we introduce...
Working Paper
Hoping or Discounting the Future
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...
Working Paper
Measurement and Explanation of Inequality in Health and Health Care in Low-Income Settings
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...
Working Paper
Entitlement Failure from a Food Quality Perspective
The substantive role that vitamin and mineral deficiencies play in shaping crisis-related morbidity and mortality was not widely understood when Amartya Sen elaborated his arguments about moral rights of the hungry, entitlements, and public action...
Working Paper
Debt Relief and Health Care in Kenya
Kenya’s external debt has continued to swell over the years, and despite the country meeting its debt commitment through regular servicing, this has been done at the expense of key social services such as health, education, water and sanitation...
Working Paper
‘Ask not what your country can do for you’
This paper investigates how persistent changes in trust caused by the Great Recession have affected how governments and citizens across Europe responded to the next global crisis: the COVID-19 pandemic.We show that increases in individualism and...