Between 2000 and 2002, the authors followed 1621 individuals in Delhi, India using a combination of weekly and monthly-recall health questionnaires. In 2008, they augmented these data with another 8 weeks of surveys during which households were experimentally allocated to surveys with different...

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...

Data from the British National Child Development Study show that, among 33-year-olds, ill health (as measured by cardinalized responses to a question on self-assessed health) is concentrated among the worse off. The authors seek to decompose the inequalities in health status into their...

This paper analyzes the importance of strengthening the relationship of accountability between health service providers and citizens for improving access to and quality of health care. How this is to be achieved, and whether it works, however, remain open questions. The paper presents a...

India has relatively poor health outcomes, despite having a well-developed administrative system, good technical skills in many fields, and an extensive network of public health institutions for research, training, and diagnostics. This suggests that the health system may be misdirecting its...

Lack of sanitation and poor hygiene behavior cause a tremendous disease burden among the poor. This paper evaluates the impact of the Total Sanitation and Sanitation Marketing project in Indonesia, where about 11 percent of children have diarrhea in any two-week period and more than 33,000...

This paper proposes two measures for assessing the impact of interventions on the lives of disabled people, the Activity Limitation Score (ALS) and the Participation restriction Score (PRS). These measures are closely linked to the World Health Organization's (WHO's) International Classification...

The association between hygiene, sanitation, and health is well documented, yet thousands of children die each year from exposure to contaminated fecal matter. At the same time, evidence on the effectiveness of at-scale behavior change interventions to improve sanitation and hygiene practices is...

By the end of 1999, an estimated 24.5 million Africans were living with HIV/AIDS, accounting for more that seventy percent of all global infections. In Tanzania, an estimated 1.3 million people (of a total population of 33 million) were believed to be infected with HIV, and 140,000 had already...

This paper analyzes a randomized experiment that uses novel strategies to promote handwashing with soap at critical times in Peru. It evaluates a large-scale intervention that includes a mass media provincial campaign and a district-level community component. The analysis finds that the mass...