Describes features of the People's Rural Health Promotion Scheme (PRHS), emanating from the community-based People's Rural Education Movement (PREM) initiative created in 1980 for empowering Indians through literacy, health care and livelihood programmes. Details the management of the health...

Why do many households remain exposed to large exogenous sources of non-systematic income risk? We use a series of randomized field experiments in rural India to test the importance of price and non-price factors in the adoption of an innovative rainfall insurance product. Demand is...

This paper reviews the Financial System Stability Assessment Update on the Philippines. The assessment reveals that the banking sector has been strengthened considerably since the Asian crisis of the late 1990s and today appears generally resilient to a broad range of macroeconomic risks. The...

The paper discusses the stability of Brazil's financial system, which is diversified and shows sustained economic progress. Fiscal and monetary policies have been aimed to improve bank reserves, and foreign exchange intervention has been streamlined to curb volatility in the exchange market....

Insurance regulation in South Africa is sound and takes a thorough approach to regulation, recognizes the scale and development of the market, and the need for effective market conduct as prudential regulation. There are particular challenges in improving standards of market conduct, in both...