During the past decade, the use of conditional cash transfers to increase investment in human capital has generated considerable excitement in both research and policy forums. Such schemes are being increasingly adopted in a number of contexts and countries to improve outcomes in health,...

Africa has historically provided the geographical flashpoint of ethical issues relating to family planning programs. Until recently in Sub-Saharan Africa, advocacy of family planning by non-Africans was unacceptable and by Africans politically inadvisable. This has changed in the 1980s. The...

The author tests the hypothesis that education improves health and increases people's life expectancy. Smoking histories-reconstructed from retrospective data in the National Health Interview Surveys in the United States-show that after 1950, when information about the dangers associated with...

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 study examines the impact of a fee-waiver program for basic medical services on health care utilization in Armenia. Because of the reduction in public financing of health services and decentralization and increased privatization of health care provision, private out-of-pocket contributions...

An estimated 500,000 women, 99 percent of them from the developing world, die each year from pregnancy-related causes. About three quarters of these deaths are the direct result of obstetrical complications -- hemorrhage, infection, toxemia, obstructed labor, and abortion (under primitive and...

This report examines the relationship between reproductive behavior and child survivalin Egypt. The relationship is of fundamental importance to an understanding of demographic dynamics and for the formulation of population policies. Using Egyptian data from 1975-80, it was found that weaning...

This study is designed to measure financial trends and new initiatives in support of the Safe Motherhood (SM) Initiative, identify issues of statistical methodology that may constrain the analysis, and establish a baseline for 1988 against which to measure future financial trends. Global support...

The main health issues for Jamaican women are nutrition, fertility, infection, chronic diseases, and stress and social problems. The two leading causes of adult health for women are cerebro-vascular accidents and coronary heart disease - of which high blood pressure is a major component among...

Each year 500,000 women die from causes related to pregnancy - 99 percent of them in developing countries. While many of those pregnancies are unwanted and could have been prevented by family planning, only a minority of developing country couples use effective contraceptive methods. For some...