Rapid growth of Internet use in high-income economies, has raised the specter of a"digital divide"that will marginalize developing countries, because they can neither afford Internet access, nor use it effectively when it is available. Using a new cross-country data set, the authors investigate...

The authors develop comparative indices of environmental policy and performance for 31 countries using a quantified analysis of reports prepared for the United Nations Conference on Environmental and Development. In cross-country regressions, they find a very strong, continuous association...

Environmental degradation can inflict serious damage on poor people because their livelihoods often depend on natural resource use and their living conditions may offer little protection from air, water, and soil pollution. At the same time, poverty-constrained options may induce the poor to...

This paper describes a new incentive-based pollution control program in China in which the environmental performance of firms is rated and reported to the public. Firms are rated from best to worst using five colors-green, blue, yellow, red, and black-and the ratings are disseminated to the...

Program administrators are often faced with the difficult problem of allocating scarce resources among regions in a country when interventions are aimed at addressing multiple objectives. One main concern is the tradeoff between poverty reduction and improvement of environmental quality. To...

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...

This paper takes a bibliometric tour of the past 40 years of health economics using bibliographic"metadata"from EconLit supplemented by citation data from Google Scholar and the authors'topical classifications. The authors report the growth of health economics (33,000 publications since 1969 --...

The political economy of health care is complex, as stakeholders have conflicting preferences over efficiency and equity. This paper formally models the preferences of consumer and producer groups involved in priority setting and judicialization in public health care. It uses a unique dataset of...

There is building evidence in India that the delivery of health services suffers from an actual shortfall in trained health professionals, but also from unsatisfactory results of existing service providers working in the public and private sectors. This study focusses on the public sector and...

Croatia began to implement case-based provider payment reforms in hospitals beginning in 2002, starting with broad-based categories according to therapeutic procedures. In 2009, formal diagnostic related groups were introduced, known locally as dijagnosticko terapijske skupine. This study...