It is often argued that engaging in indoor residual spraying in areas with high coverage of mosquito bed nets may discourage net ownership and use. This is just a case of a public program having perverse incentives. This paper analyzes new data from a randomized control trial conducted in...

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...

What can other developing countries learn from Sri Lanka on achieving good health at low cost? While its well-organized medical and maternal-child health services have been documented elsewhere, this paper fills a gap in documenting how it organizes services to reduce the population's exposure...

Paying for performance provides financial rewards to medical care providers for improvements in performance measured by specific utilization and quality of care indicators. In 2006, Rwanda began a paying for performance scheme to improve health services delivery, including HIV/AIDS services....

This paper explores the possibility that universal health coverage may inadvertently result in distorted labor market choices, with workers preferring informal employment over formal employment, leading to negative effects on investment and growth, as well as reduced protection against...

Many different strategies have been proposed to improve the delivery of health care services, from capacity building to establishing new payment mechanisms. Recent attention has also asked whether improvements in the way health care services are governed could make a difference. These approaches...

Achieving the objective of China's current health system reform, namely equitable improvements in health outcomes, will be difficult not least because of the continuously growing income disparities in the country. The analysis in this paper shows that since 2000, disparity in selected health...

Health facility surveys come in various guises. One dimension in which they vary is their motivation. Some seek to understand better links between households and providers. Others seek to understand better provider behavior and performance. Still others seek to understand the interrelationships...

This paper experimentally examines efforts aimed at improving health worker performance in the context of the 2014-15 West African Ebola crisis. Roughly two years before the outbreak in Sierra Leone, the study randomly assigned two accountability interventions to government-run health...

Public health systems that are capable of disease surveillance and action to prevent and manage outbreaks require trustworthy community-embedded public health workers who are empowered to undertake their tasks as professionals. Economic theory on incentives and norms of agents tasked with...