Download or read book Essays on Poverty Well being and Health in Developing Countries written by and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Health Economic Development and Household Poverty written by Sara Bennett and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2007-09-12 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Accessible and edited by authors based at a top institution, this book provides readers with an excellent summary in an easy-to-read style of this burgeoning field of research. In this volume Bennett, Gilson and Mills have gathered together essays written by academics and experts in the fields of health policy and economic development, each underscoring the need for political commitment to meet the needs of the poor and the development of strategies to build this commitment, covering: evidence regarding the links between health, economic development and household poverty evidence on the extent to which health care systems address the needs of the poor and the near poor innovative measures to make health care interventions widely available to the poor. Current and topical, this book is of great relevance to policy makers and practitioners in the field of international health and development and researchers engaged with global health and poverty as well as being ideal reading for students of international health and development.
Download or read book Essays in Development Economics written by Diana Kim Lee and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 110 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poverty and health are two topics in the field of development economics that are of critical importance to both researchers and policy-makers. Despite advances in poverty alleviation and gains in health outcomes in many developing countries, many challenges remain. Two of these challenges include accurately measuring poverty and improving the quality of health care delivery systems. In this dissertation, I present three essays with theoretical, empirical, and policy-relevant insights into these two challenges. The first essay addresses the issue of accurate poverty measurement by developing a new asset index that captures long run household economic well-being. The accurate measurement of household well-being is necessary for measuring poverty levels and targeting poverty programs. However, since standard expenditure aggregates are costly to collect, relative well-being in developing countries is often measured using asset indices based on durable goods ownership. Although various methods exist to generate proxies for economic well-being (e.g., principal component analysis), the underlying theories associated with these methods have not been formalized. This makes it difficult to interpret the economic meaning of the resulting indices and can lead to inaccurate targeting and evaluation. In this paper, I develop a new asset index, the utility index, by modeling and structurally estimating household preferences over discrete assets. By drawing from economic theory, the utility index can be more directly interpreted as capturing long run household well-being. In contrast to existing asset indices, the utility index incorporates additional information on prices, demographics, and spatial and temporal variation and can therefore be used for policy simulations that are not otherwise possible. After developing the theoretical model, I describe a strategy to construct the utility index by structurally estimating the marginal utility associated with each asset. I then demonstrate how the utility index can be used by measuring changes in poverty in Nicaragua using data from the Living Standards Measurement Surveys. I also use the model to project changes in poverty under a constant income distribution but changing prices and find that about a third of the poverty decrease measured from 1998 to 2005 can be attributed to decreasing asset prices. In addition, I show through the empirical analysis that traditional asset indices are only moderate approximations for household well-being. Finally, I discuss and demonstrate the distinctions between asset and consumption measures, which point to the complementary nature of the two strands of measurement. The second essay presents an alternate approach for improving accurate poverty measurement in developing countries. Although the utility index developed in the first essay presents a method for measuring long run economic well-being, complementary measures of short run welfare are necessary for identifying households which are vulnerable to falling into transitory poverty. Again, given the expenses associated with collecting full consumption data, researchers have developed methods to construct wealth indices based on dichotomous asset and consumption indicators. This work provides guidance on generating such indices by comparing across various methods of construction and variable choices. Specifically, we assess the performance of alternate indices using data from the Living Standards Measurement Surveys in five countries in Sub-Saharan Africa--Ghana, Rwanda, Uganda, Tanzania, and Malawi. We compare indices against a benchmark of household per capita expenditure according to three criteria: rank correlation coefficients, sensitivity to identifying poor households, and accuracy of classifying households as poor or non-poor. Comparing across construction methods, we find that indices generated using principal components analysis correspond most closely with expenditure, though variation across construction methods is small. Comparing across variable inclusion groups, we find that indices generated using a combination of indicators drawn from the categories of staple food consumption, other food consumption, housing quality, semi-durables expenditure, and durables ownership tend to outperform indices generated using variables from only one or two categories. We also assess the various indices in urban and rural subsamples and in analyses of repeated cross-sections and find that index performance is similar to what we find in national, single wave analyses. The third essay turns to the challenge of improving the quality of health care delivery systems by looking at provider investment decisions. Pay-for-performance (P4P) programs, which aim to increase health service provision and quality using financial incentives, have been recently introduced in a number of developing countries. P4P programs contract directly on outputs without specifying the mechanisms for improvements, allowing providers to innovate and modify different aspects of health care delivery as needed. Characterizing these provider responses can help to identify successful mechanisms for quality improvement and enhance our understanding of the links between P4P and overall health systems strengthening. In this paper, we examine provider input responses to the Rwandan P4P program using facility-level data from the 2007 Demographic and Health Survey Service Provision Assessment (SPA) collected after the randomized program rollout to a subset of districts. We focus on facility-level incentives for institutional deliveries, which, as documented in earlier research, resulted in higher institutional delivery rates. Using the SPA facility data, we find that the program's effect on institutional delivery rates is comparable to results in previous studies that used household surveys. Comparing system inputs, we find positive treatment effects for a general management indicator and the daily presence of staff per capita providing maternity-related services. There are no differences in other delivery-specific and general health care delivery inputs. Additionally, we perform a mediation analysis to assess the link between inputs and outcomes and find that management and staffing differences explain a relatively small fraction of the P4P effect on institutional delivery rates. The small mediation effects indicate the potential importance of unobserved factors, such as recruitment effort, in the provider production function. Furthermore, the null results for the other analyzed inputs suggest a weaker link between P4P and overall health system strengthening.
Download or read book How Does Poor Health Contribute to Poverty written by Jenkins Tanga and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2016-12-30 with total page 14 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essay from the year 2016 in the subject Economy - Health Economics, grade: Distinction, London School of Economics (International Development), course: Msc Development Studies, language: English, abstract: Poverty has been identified as a menace to Africa’s development. Some scholars have argued that poor health is a major contributing factor to poverty, inter alia. While this study grasps with the question of how poor health contributes to poverty, this paper will argue that poverty does strongly contribute to poor health and the reverse may be true as well. Firstly, this paper will provide clarity on the poor health-poverty nexus concept and assumptions. Secondly, it will look at the main body in which it will discuss that poverty to a larger extent does lead to poor health and then the reverse causality as poor health can also lead to poverty. This section will use Uganda as a case study because Uganda was a labeled success story with the fight against HIV/AIDS but just like any-other developing country, Uganda has a number of diseases exacerbated and sustained by poverty. This will then take the essay to the final section where it will emerge that health does play a pivotal role in development overtime and so developing countries need to deal with it by reducing poverty levels.
Download or read book Poverty Inequality and Development written by Alain de Janvry and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2006-06-09 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays honors a remarkable man and his work. Erik Thorbecke has made significant contributions to the microeconomic and the macroeconomic analysis of poverty, inequality and development, ranging from theory to empirics and policy. The essays in this volume display the same range. As a collection they make the fundamental point that deep understanding of these phenomena requires both the micro and the macro perspectives together, utilizing the strengths of each but also the special insights that come when the two are linked together. After an overview section which contains the introductory chapter and a chapter examining the historical roots of Erik Thorbecke's motivations, the essays in this volume are grouped into four parts, each part identifying a major strand of Erik's work—Measurement of Poverty and Inequality, Micro Behavior and Market Failure, SAMs and CGEs, and Institutions and Development. The range of topics covered in the essays, written by leading authorities in their own areas, highlight the extraordinary depth and breadth of Erik Thorbecke's influence in research and policy on poverty, inequality and development. Acknowledgements These papers were presented at a conference in honor of Erik Thorbecke held at Cornell University on October 10-11, 2003. The conference was supported by the funds of the H. E. Babcock Chair in Food, Nutrition and Public Policy, and the T. H. Lee Chair in World Affairs at Cornell University.
Download or read book Globalization and Poverty written by Ann Harrison and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2007-11-01 with total page 674 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the past two decades, the percentage of the world’s population living on less than a dollar a day has been cut in half. How much of that improvement is because of—or in spite of—globalization? While anti-globalization activists mount loud critiques and the media report breathlessly on globalization’s perils and promises, economists have largely remained silent, in part because of an entrenched institutional divide between those who study poverty and those who study trade and finance. Globalization and Poverty bridges that gap, bringing together experts on both international trade and poverty to provide a detailed view of the effects of globalization on the poor in developing nations, answering such questions as: Do lower import tariffs improve the lives of the poor? Has increased financial integration led to more or less poverty? How have the poor fared during various currency crises? Does food aid hurt or help the poor? Poverty, the contributors show here, has been used as a popular and convenient catchphrase by parties on both sides of the globalization debate to further their respective arguments. Globalization and Poverty provides the more nuanced understanding necessary to move that debate beyond the slogans.
Download or read book Wellbeing in Developing Countries written by Ian Gough and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2007-05-31 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a world where many experience unprecedented levels of wellbeing, chronic poverty remains a major concern for many developing countries and the international community. Conventional frameworks for understanding development and poverty have focused on money, commodities and economic growth. This 2007 book challenges these conventional approaches and contributes to a new paradigm for development centred on human wellbeing. Poor people are not defined solely by their poverty and a wellbeing approach provides a better means of understanding how people become and stay poor. It examines three perspectives: ideas of human functioning, capabilities and needs; the analysis of livelihoods and resource use; and research on subjective wellbeing and happiness. A range of international experts from psychology, economics, anthropology, sociology, political science and development evaluate the state-of-the-art in understanding wellbeing from these perspectives. This book establishes a new strategy and methodology for researching wellbeing that can influence policy.
Download or read book Communities in Action written by National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2017-04-27 with total page 583 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the United States, some populations suffer from far greater disparities in health than others. Those disparities are caused not only by fundamental differences in health status across segments of the population, but also because of inequities in factors that impact health status, so-called determinants of health. Only part of an individual's health status depends on his or her behavior and choice; community-wide problems like poverty, unemployment, poor education, inadequate housing, poor public transportation, interpersonal violence, and decaying neighborhoods also contribute to health inequities, as well as the historic and ongoing interplay of structures, policies, and norms that shape lives. When these factors are not optimal in a community, it does not mean they are intractable: such inequities can be mitigated by social policies that can shape health in powerful ways. Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity seeks to delineate the causes of and the solutions to health inequities in the United States. This report focuses on what communities can do to promote health equity, what actions are needed by the many and varied stakeholders that are part of communities or support them, as well as the root causes and structural barriers that need to be overcome.
Download or read book Happiness and Poverty in Developing Countries written by John Malcolm Dowling and published by Springer. This book was released on 2012-11-29 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyzes the determinants of happiness for both the rich and the poor in the developing regions of Asia, Latin America and Africa. Explanatory variables include education, health and income as well as demographic and social variables. The book highlights the overwhelming importance of health in uplifting well-being in these regions.
Download or read book A Roadmap to Reducing Child Poverty written by National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2019-09-16 with total page 619 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The strengths and abilities children develop from infancy through adolescence are crucial for their physical, emotional, and cognitive growth, which in turn help them to achieve success in school and to become responsible, economically self-sufficient, and healthy adults. Capable, responsible, and healthy adults are clearly the foundation of a well-functioning and prosperous society, yet America's future is not as secure as it could be because millions of American children live in families with incomes below the poverty line. A wealth of evidence suggests that a lack of adequate economic resources for families with children compromises these children's ability to grow and achieve adult success, hurting them and the broader society. A Roadmap to Reducing Child Poverty reviews the research on linkages between child poverty and child well-being, and analyzes the poverty-reducing effects of major assistance programs directed at children and families. This report also provides policy and program recommendations for reducing the number of children living in poverty in the United States by half within 10 years.
Download or read book Measuring Poverty and Wellbeing in Developing Countries written by Channing Arndt and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-12-15 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 IGO licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Detailed analyses of poverty and wellbeing in developing countries, based on household surveys, have been ongoing for more than three decades. The large majority of developing countries now regularly conduct a variety of household surveys, and the information base in developing countries with respect to poverty and wellbeing has improved dramatically. Nevertheless, appropriate measurement of poverty remains complex and controversial. This is particularly true in developing countries where (i) the stakes with respect to poverty reduction are high; (ii) the determinants of living standards are often volatile; and (iii) related information bases, while much improved, are often characterized by significant non-sample error. It also remains, to a surprisingly high degree, an activity undertaken by technical assistance personnel and consultants based in developed countries. This book seeks to enhance the transparency, replicability, and comparability of existing practice. In so doing, it also aims to significantly lower the barriers to entry to the conduct of rigorous poverty measurement and increase the participation of analysts from developing countries in their own poverty assessments. The book focuses on two domains: the measurement of absolute consumption poverty and a first order dominance approach to multidimensional welfare analysis. In each domain, it provides a series of flexible computer codes designed to facilitate analysis by allowing the analyst to start from a flexible and known base. The book volume covers the theoretical grounding for the code streams provided, a chapter on 'estimation in practice', a series of 11 case studies where the code streams are operationalized, as well as a synthesis, an extension to inequality, and a look forward.
Download or read book Three Essays on Poverty and Well Being in Developing Countries written by Juliana Yael Milovich Finkelstein and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Les différents travaux développés dans cette Thèse visent à fournir une meilleure compréhension des déterminants de la pauvreté et du bien-être dans les pays en développement. Ce faisant, ils permettent de suggérer plusieurs pistes permettant d'atteindre les deux premiers objectifs du Programme de Développement Durable à l'horizon 2030 élaboré par les Nations Unies. En partant de données macroéconomiques, et en approfondissant notre analyse à l'aide de données au niveau des ménages, cette Thèse explore les types de privations sociales qui caractérisent la pauvreté, ainsi que les principaux facteurs influençant certaines de ces privations telles que la santé nutritionnelle des enfants. La Thèse débute par une étude macroéconomique couvrant 64 pays en développement, se poursuit par une analyse reposant sur des données d'enquête relatives au Guatemala, et se termine par une évaluation de l'impact d'un programme de santé mis en œuvre par la Fondation FUNDAP dans les régions occidentales du même pays en utilisant des données individuelles plus spécifiques. Plus précisément, le premier Chapitre analyse la relation entre aide au développement et réduction de la pauvreté, un sujet sur lequel les études existantes n'ont pas débouché jusqu'à présent sur des résultats tranchés. Le Chapitre 2 vise à comprendre et à évaluer dans quelle mesure le développement de la production d'huile de palme au Guatemala (secteur agro-exportateur) contribue à accroître l'insécurité alimentaire, mesurée ici par une plus forte dénutrition observée chez les enfants. La dernière étude développée dans le troisième et dernier Chapitre cherche à évaluer les incidences de la mise en place d'un programme nutritionnel dans l'Ouest du Guatemala, appelé « Volontaires en Santé », qui opère au niveau des communautés et vise à renforcer les capacités des individus (90% de femmes) en leur donnant une formation ciblée sur la nutrition des enfants et les soins médicaux de base.
Download or read book Income Contingent Loans written by Timothy Higgins and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-05-28 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study explores the prospect of the application of the basic principles of ICL into many other potential areas of social and economic policy. Using case studies it evaluates previously implemented ICL schemes where interest rate subsidies are usually the norm, and questions the merits of this approach.
Download or read book Poverty and Health written by DAC Network on Poverty Reduction and published by World Health Organization. This book was released on 2003 with total page 91 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Investment in health is a strategically important and often underestimated component of economic development. This study sets out a systematic approach to improving health in poor countries. For emerging countries, substantially improved health outcomes are a prerequisite to breaking out of the poverty cycle. This book on poverty and health, jointly published by the OECD and WHO, sets out the essential components of a broad-scope "pro-poor" health approach for action within the health system and beyond it. It is for development practitioners in the area of health issues.
Download or read book Towards a Post development Era written by Sugata Dasgupta and published by Mittal Publications. This book was released on 1985 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Study of India and Queensland, Australia.
Download or read book Understanding Poverty and Well Being written by David Hulme and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-18 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written by a multi-disciplinary team of contributors, this collection explores the different dimensions of well being, poverty and inequality. A person’s sense of well being is compounded of many elements including economic, political and social psychology. Poverty and inequality are aspects of a lack of well being in multiple dimensions and, this texts argues, development should be considered a process that overcomes these multiple deficiencies This book examines the advantages of analysing poverty and development by multi-discipline research. Economists, political sociologists and anthropologists put forward an idea of well being from their own perspective, using their own research material, while the editors argue in their introduction that bringing to bear of many disciplines can enrich the research output of all.
Download or read book Protecting the Health of the Poor written by Abraar Karan and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2015-12-15 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nowhere is the injustice of the global distribution of income and wealth more palpable than in health. While the world's affluent spend fortunes on the most trifling treatments, poor people's lives are ruined and often cut short prematurely by challenges that could easily be overcome at low cost: childbirth, diarrhoea, malnutrition, malaria, HIV/AIDS, measles, pneumonia. Millions are avoidably dying from such causes each year and billions of lives avoidably blighted by these diseases of poverty. Drawing on in-depth empirical research spanning Asia, Latin America, and Africa, this path-breaking collection offers fresh perspectives from critically engaged scholars. Protecting the Health of the Poor presents a call and a vision for unified efforts across geographies, levels and sectors to make the right to health truly universal.
