This paper examines the impacts of disasters on dynamic human capital production using panel data from Bangladesh, Ethiopia, and Malawi. The empirical results show that the accumulation of biological human capital prior to disasters helps children maintain investments in the post-disaster...

This paper develops a link between four central components of the demographic transition: survival rates; fertility decisions; altruistic intergenerational transfers from workers toward their parents; and economic growth. An increase in child survival is found to reduce the fertility rate and...

Labor markets are increasingly global. Overseas work can enrich households but also split them geographically, with ambiguous net effects on decisions about work, investment, and education. These net effects, and their mechanisms, are poorly understood. This study investigates a policy...

Countries are increasingly being ranked by some new"mashup index of development,"defined as a composite index for which existing theory and practice provides little or no guidance to its design. Thus the index has an unusually large number of moving parts, which the producer is essentially free...

This paper addresses policies aimed at closing the rural-urban gap for one of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the under-five mortality rate (U5MR). The paper relies on the Maquette for MDG Simulations (MAMS), a computable general equilibrium model, applied to the database of an...

This paper explores the major challenges to the sustainability of health sector financing in the countries of the Western Balkans - Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and the province of Kosovo. It focuses on how the incentives created...

In the public sector in developing countries, leakage of public resources could prove detrimental to users and affect the well-being of the population. This paper empirically examines the importance of leakage of government resources in the health sector in Chad, and its effects on the prices of...

This article analyzes the extent to which the Basic Benefit Package (BBP), a subsidized health program in Armenia, increases utilization and affordability of outpatient health care among the poor. The authors find that beneficiaries of the BBP pay approximately 45 percent less in fees for doctor...

This paper analyzes the distributional effect of public spending in Zambia using the most recent data from the 2010 Living Conditions Monitoring Survey. The analysis focuses on both the"traditional"social sectors, such as education and public healthcare, as well as other spending areas less...

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...