The AIDS epidemic is dramatically increasing mortality of adults in many Sub-Saharan African countries, with potentially severe consequences for surviving family members. Until now, most of these impacts had not been quantified. The authors examine the impact of adult mortality in Tanzania on...

The author examines the Asian crisis's impact on children in 100 Indonesian villages, based on data from four rounds of the 100 villages surveys that was used to examine changes in health status, school attendance rates, and children's participation in the labor force. She finds little evidence...

Vietnam's rapid economic growth in the 1990s greatly increased the incomes of Vietnamese households, which led to a dramatic decline in poverty. Over the same period, child malnutrition rates in Vietnam, as measured by low height for age in children under 5, fell from 50 percent in 1992-93 to 34...

The objective of this paper is to document the extent, and distribution of child, and adult malnutrition in Guatemala; to analyze the relationship between selected child, maternal, household and community characteristics, and children's nutritional status; and, to outline the implications of the...

About 20,000 early childhood development centers provided day care for and prepared for primary school more than 1 million children aged three to seven (roughly 20 percent of children in that age group) in Kenya in 1995. The number of child care facilities reached 23,690 by the end of 1999. The...

The author uses the Ecuador Living Standards and Measurement Surveys (LSMS 1998 and 1999) to analyze the characteristics and determinants of child labor and schooling. She shows how interventions at the level of adults affect child labor and school enrollment. For example, an employment policy...

Clinic-based data on malnutrition are the most readily available for following malnutrition levels and trends in most countries, but there is a bias inherent in clinic-based estimates of malnutrition rates. The authors compare annual clinic-based malnutrition data and those from four household...

Inequalities in health have recently started to receive a good deal of attention in the developing world. But how large are they? An how large are the differences across countries? Recent data from a 42-country study, show large, but varying inequalities in health across countries. The author...

The author addresses two issues. First, how can health inequalities be measured so as to take into account policymakers'attitudes toward inequality? The Gini coefficient and the related concentration index embody one particular set of value judgments. Generalizing these indexes allows...

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...