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...

Vietnam's Health Care Fund for the Poor (HCFP) uses government revenues to finance health care for the poor, ethnic minorities living in selected mountainous provinces designated as difficult, and all households living in communes officially designated as highly disadvantaged. The program, which...

By international standards, and given its relatively low per capita income, Vietnam has achieved substantial reductions in, and low levels of, infant and under-five mortality. Wagstaff and Nguyen review existing evidence and provide new evidence on whether, under the economic liberalization...

India launched the ‘Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana' (RSBY) health insurance scheme for the poor in 2008. Utilising 3 waves (1999-2000, 2004-05 and 2011-12) of household level data from the nationally representative consumption expenditure survey of the National Sample Survey Organisation and...

This paper outlines changes that have been made in the 2019 version of the Health Equity and Financial Protection Indicators database. On the financial protection side, the changes include an increase in the number of indicators from five to 14; revisions to several previous data points,...

Despite the development community's shift in emphasis toward the poor, malnutrition, like other dimensions of poor health, is concentrated among the worst off. Yet targets are still defined in terms of population averages. Consider, then, this information about malnutrition rates among different...