The authors combine household survey and census data to construct a provincial poverty map of Vietnam and evaluate the accuracy of geographically targeted antipoverty programs. First, they estimate per capita expenditure as a function of selected household and geographic characteristics using...

A large body of empirical work in recent years has focused on measuring and explaining socioeconomic inequalities in health outcomes and health service use. In any effort to address these questions, analysts must confront the issue of how to measure socioeconomic status. In developing countries,...

India spends 6 percent of its GDP on health-three times the amount spent by Indonesia and twice that of China-and spending on non-chronic morbidities is three times that of chronic illnesses. It is normally assumed that the high spending on non-chronic illnesses reflects the prevalence of...

This paper assesses the extent to which provider payment mechanisms can help developing countries address their leading health care problems. It first identifies four key problems in the health care systems in developing countries: 1) public facilities, which provide the bulk of secondary and...

Using household data from five successive national surveys, the author analyzes the microdeterminants of (and changes in) consumption, poverty, growth, and inequality in Bangladesh from 1983 to 1996. Education, demographics, land ownership, occupation, and geographic location all affect...

The author uses a large, nationally representative household survey to analyze the impact of internal remittances (from Guatemala), and international remittances (from the United States) on poverty in Guatemala. With only one exception, he finds that both internal and international remittances...

Numerous analysts have linked volunteering and participation to positive economic and political outcomes. The author uses the 1994 Peru Living Standards Measurement Survey to analyze volunteering patterns in rural Peru. He finds that volunteers in rural Peru have a high opportunity cost of time....

Empirical investigations of poverty in developing countries tend to focus on the incidence of poverty at a particular point in time. If the incidence of poverty increases, however, there is no information about how many new poor have joined the existing poor and how many people have escaped...

This paper validates a recently proposed method to estimate intra-generational mobility through repeated cross-sectional surveys. The technique allows the creation of a"synthetic panel"-- done by predicting future or past household income using a set of simple modeling and error structure...

The author examines the role of different data collection methods--including the types of data they produce--in the analysis of social phenomena in developing countries. He points out that one confusing factor in the"quantitative-qualitative"debate is that a distinction is not clearly made...