People migrate to improve their well-being, whether through an expansion of economic and social opportunities or a reduction in persecution. Yet a large literature suggests that migration can be a stressful process, with potentially negative impacts on mental health, reducing the net benefits of...

The post-communist transition to social health insurance in many of the Central and Eastern European and Central Asian countries provides a unique opportunity to try to answer some of the unresolved issues in the debate over the relative merits of social health insurance and tax-financed health...

Infectious disease outbreaks can exact a high human and economic cost through illness and death. But, as with severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in East Asia in 2003, or the plague outbreak in Surat, India, in 1994, they can also create severe economic disruptions even when there is,...

Southern African institutions involved in disaster management face two major new threats: the HIV/AIDS pandemic (eroding organizational capacity and increasing vulnerability of the population), and climate change (higher risk of extreme events and disasters). Analyzing the combined effects of...

The authors report the results of a review of the Chinese-language and English-language literatures on service delivery in China, asking how well China's health care providers perform, what determines their performance, and how the government can improve it. They find current performance leaves...

This paper analyzes the socioeconomic determinants of HIV infection and related sexual behaviors using the 2004Lesotho Demographic and Health Survey. The authors find that in Lesotho education appears to have a protective effect: it is negatively associated with HIV infection (although not...

The benefits of good health to individuals and to society are strongly positive and improving the health of the poor is a key Millennium Development Goal. A typical health strategy advocated by some is increased public spending on health targeted to favor the poor and backed by foreign...

This study constructs three indices to measure how well Brazil's young people are surviving their transition to adulthood. Youth development is difficult to quantify because of the multi-dimensionality of youth behavior. Most monitoring use individual indicators in specific sectors, making it...

Financial barriers to seeking care are frequently cited as one of the main causes of underutilization of child health care services. This paper estimates the impact of Indonesia's healthcard on health care use by children. Evaluation of the healthcard effect is complicated by the fact that card...

Controversy exists over whether the estimated effects of schooling on health care use reflect the influence of unobserved factors. Existing estimates may overstate the schooling effect because of the failure to control for unobserved variables or may be downwardly biased due to measurement...