We review empirical evidence on the ability of decentralization to enhance preference matching and technical efficiency in the provision of health and education in developing countries. Many influential surveys have found that the empirical evidence of decentralization's effects on service...

According to the catastrophic health expenditure methodology a household is in catastrophe if its health out-of-pocket budget share exceeds a critical threshold. We develop a conceptual framework for addressing three questions in relation to this methodology, namely: 1. Can a budget share be...

When health status is an ordered response variable, Allison and Foster (2004) postulate that a distribution Q exhibits more inequality than a distribution P if Q isobtained from P via a sequence of median preserving spreads. This paper introduces aparametric family of inequality indices which...