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Describes a computer model to aid decisionmakers in the health services field in developing countries. As developing countries increasingly depend on user fees to finance health care services, decisionmakers in those countries face the difficult task of developing and implementing cost-recovery systems. In recent years health economists have developed computer models to aid in such analyses. This paper contains a user-friendly computer model on a 3A' diskette which combines information about demand and supply for health care obtained through surveys undertaken in Zaire. It allows the user to enter data from other settings and to simulate various changes in health care financing under a broad...
Over the past twenty years, many low- and middle-income countries have experimented with health insurance options. While their plans have varied widely in scale and ambition, their goals are the same: to make health services more affordable through the use of public subsidies while also moving care providers partially or fully into competitive markets. Colombia embarked in 1993 on a fifteen-year effort to cover its entire population with insurance, in combination with greater freedom to choose among providers. A decade later Mexico followed suit with a program tailored to its federal system. Several African nations have introduced new programs in the past decade, and many are testing options...
This paper develops a macroeconomic model for a small, open, developing economy that borrows abroad - to study the dynamic interaction between debt and growth and the impacts of various policies and exogenous shocks on the rate of capital accumulation, the current account, and debt. Adjustment policies that increase productivity and efficient use of capital increase both growth and the stock of external debt - but the new level of debt may be sustainable in the long run.
This paper analyzes the sovereign defaults of the 1930s and their implications for the debt crisis of the 1980s. It reports nine major findings. There is little evidence that financial markets have grown more sophisticated' over time, or that banks have a comparative advantage over the bond market in processing information. (2) Debt default in the 1930s depended on a combination of factors, . including the magnitude of the external shocks, the level of debt, and: the: economic policy response, as well as on a range, of: noneconomic considerations. (3) Countries which interrupted service recovered more quickly from the Great Depression than countries which resisted default. This contrasts wit...
A Colonial Lexicon is the first historical investigation of how childbirth became medicalized in Africa. Rejecting the “colonial encounter” paradigm pervasive in current studies, Nancy Rose Hunt elegantly weaves together stories about autopsies and bicycles, obstetric surgery and male initiation, to reveal how concerns about strange new objects and procedures fashioned the hybrid social world of colonialism and its aftermath in Mobutu’s Zaire. Relying on archival research in England and Belgium, as well as fieldwork in the Congo, Hunt reconstructs an ethnographic history of a remote British Baptist mission struggling to survive under the successive regimes of King Leopold II’s Congo ...
Recently global health issues have leapt to the forefront of the international agenda and are now an everyday concern around the world. The war for global health is clearly being lost on many fronts and the massive body count is mounting fast. Re-emerging diseases such as polio and tuberculosis, long thought to be on the verge of elimination, are now coupled with the devastation of newly emerging ones such as SARS and avian influenza. In addition, the shock of bioterrorism has given a tragic poignancy to the importance of studying the failure of the global health governance system. Compiled by renowned specialists, this volume studies the global challenges and responses to these issues, as well as the roles of central institutions such as the World Health Organization, the World Trade Organization and the G8. Health practitioners and clinicians seeking a context for their front-line care provision, as well as scholars and students of global health issues, will find the volume highly valuable.
This publication examines whether a social protection system (broadly defined to include policy interventions, public institutions, and the regulation of private institutions to address welfare costs of problems such as job loss and extended unemployment, health episodes, old age, and life-time poverty) exists in Chile or whether it is has a set of loosely co-ordinated programmes instead. It assesses whether households are provided with appropriate tools to mitigate risks to their income, identifies gaps in coverage, and sets out guidelines, grounded in a conceptual framework, designed to increase the effectiveness of social protection.
The comparative effectiveness of schools in developing countries has become the center of a lively debate. Of particular concern is the appropriate analytic method to employ when examing school effects. This paper uses a multi-level approach to examine determinants of growth in grade 8 mathematics achievement in Thailand. Results of the analysis showed that schools in Thailand were equally effective in transforming pretest scores into posttest scores, and that schools and classrooms contributed 32 percent of the variance in posttest scores. Higher levels of achievement were associated with a higher proportion of teachers qualified to teach mathematics, an enriched curriculum and frequent use...
'Beyond Survival' breaks new ground in the ongoing debate about health finance and financial protection from the costs of health care. The evidence and discussion support the need to consider financial protection, in addition to health status, as a policy objective when setting priorities for health systems. This book reviews the Latin American experience with health reform in the last 20 years and the fundamentals of health system financing, using new evidence to show the magnitude and mechanisms that determine the impoverishing effects of health events (diseases, accidents, and those of the life cycle). It provides options for policy makers on how to protect, and help household to protect ...