Empirical studies on health at a disaggregate level-by socioeconomic group or geographic location-can provide useful … information for designing poverty-focused interventions. Using Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data, the author investigates … the determinants of health outcomes in low-income countries both at the national level, and for rural and urban areas …

Providing protection against the financial risk of high out-of-pocket health spending is one of the main goals of the … Philippines’ health strategy. Yet, as this paper shows using eight household surveys, health spending increased by 150 percent … (real) from 2000 to 2012, with the sharpest increases occurring in recent years. The main driver of health spending is …

increase in private health investments. …

) health services across municipios (counties) in Brazil, and on the probability that uninsured individuals who require medical … attention actually receive access to those health services. Using data from the 1998 PNAD survey they demonstrate that higher … access to health services when he, or she seeks it. The authors find that an increase in income inequality, an increase in …

Public health services, which reduce a population's exposure to disease through such measures as sanitation and vector … public health efforts raised labor productivity and life expectancies well before modern curative technologies became widely …-keeping practices in a few Chinese villages. For various reasons, mostly of political economy, public funds for health services in India …

status. The authors use data on local health facilities to investigate the role that they may have played in raising children …

-called core or essential public health functions, such as disease surveillance, health education, monitoring and evaluation …, workforce development, enforcement of public health laws and regulations, public health research, and health policy development …

The benefits of good health to individuals and to society are strongly positive and improving the health of the poor is … a key Millennium Development Goal. A typical health strategy advocated by some is increased public spending on health … vaccines to ameliorate infectious diseases bedeviling the developing nations. But if the objective is better health outcomes at …

The author is concerned with the role of education as a determinant of health care choices. His central premise is that … utilization of health services is determined not solely by an individual's own education, but rather by a notion of effective … education of different household members affects health care choices. He tests these hypotheses on data from Mozambique …

Health systems are not just about improving health: good ones also ensure that people are protected from the financial … consequences of receiving medical care. Anecdotal evidence suggests health systems often perform badly in this respect, apparently … to measure financial protection in health. Both relate a household's out-of-pocket spending to a threshold defined in …