It is generally accepted that government health expenditures should disproportionately benefit the poor. And yet in most developing countries the opposite is the case. This paper examines the implications of a central assumption of benefit incidence analysis, namely that the unit cost of a...

In Laos health shocks are more common than most other shocks and more concentrated among the poor. They tend to be more idiosyncratic than non-health shocks, and are more costly, partly because they lead to high medical expenses, but also because they lead to income losses that are sizeable...

The World Bank has produced a huge volume of books and papers on development - 20,000 publications spanning decades, but growing appreciably since 1990. This paper finds evidence that many of these publications have influenced development thinking, as indicated by the citations found using...

Bibliometric measures based on citations are widely used in assessing the scientific publication records of authors, institutions and journals. Yet currently favored measures lack a clear conceptual foundation and are known to have counter-intuitive properties. The authors propose a new approach...

Inefficiency is commonplace, yet exercises aimed at improving provider performance efforts to date to measure inefficiency and use it in benchmarking exercises have not been altogether satisfactory. This paper proposes a new approach that blends the themes of Data Envelopment Analysis and the...