How can the impact of aid be estimated in the presence of fungibility? And how far does fungibility reduce its benefits? These questions are analyzed in a context where a donor wants to target its efforts on a specific sector and specific geographic areas. A traditional...

This paper uses a common household survey instrument and a common set of imputation assumptions to estimate the pro-poorness of government health expenditure across 69 countries at all levels of income. On average, government health expenditure emerges as significantly pro-rich, but there is...

This paper exploits the transitions between tax-financed health care and social health insurance in the OECD countries over the period 1960-2006 to assess the effects of adopting social health insurance over tax finance on per capita health spending, amenable mortality, and labor market...

The health systems of Japan and the Asian Tigers--Hong Kong (China), the Republic of Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan (China)--and the recent reforms to them provide many potentially valuable lessons to East Asia's developing countries. All five systems have managed to keep a check on health...

Among the conclusions the authors reach about malnutrition rates, among different economic groups: 1) inequalities in malnutrition almost disfavor the poor; 2) it's not just that the poor have higher rates of malnutrition. The rate of malnutrition declines continuously with rising living...

The last few years have seen a growing commitment worldwide to universal health coverage (UHC). Yet there is a lack of clarity on how to measure progress towards UHC. This paper proposes a ?mashup? index that captures both aspects of UHC: that everyone?irrespective of their ability-to-pay?gets...

This paper looks at differential progress on the health Millennium Development Goals between the poor and better-off within countries. The findings are based on original analysis of 235 Demographic and Health Surveys and Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys, spanning 64 developing countries over...

What major insights have emerged from development economics in the past decade, and how do they matter for the World Bank? This challenging question was recently posed by World Bank Group President David Malpass to the staff of the Development Research Group. This paper assembles a set of 13...