On average, child health outcomes are better in urban than in rural areas of developing countries. Understanding the nature and the causes of this rural-urban disparity is essential in contemplating the health consequences of the rapid urbanization taking place throughout the developing world...

The rural-urban gap in infant mortality rates is explained using a new decomposition method that permits identification of the ontribution of unobserved heterogeneity at the household and the community level. Using Demographic and Health Survey data for six Francophone countries in Western...

The widespread use of pesticides in agriculture provides a particularly complex pattern of multidimensionalnegative side-effects, ranging from food safety related effects to the deterioratian of farmland ecosystems.The assessment of the economic implications of such negative processes is fraught...

The Brabant Data Set, now freely accessible, contains informationon a sample cohort of 3,000 individuals born around 1940 from surveysin 1952, 1983 and 1993, as well as on deaths between 1994 and 2009.In line with numerous epidemiological studies we find that among theearly variables recorded at...

Higher educated individuals are healthier and live longer than their lower educated peers. One reason is that lower educated individuals engage more in unhealthy behaviours including consumption of a poor diet, but it is not clear why they do so. In this paper we develop an economic theory of...

Over a five-year period in the 1990s Vietnam experienced annual economic growth of more than 8% and a decrease of 15 points in the proportion of children chronically malnourished (stunted). We estimate the extent to which changes in the distribution of child nutritional status can be explained...

This paper examines international trade in tainted food and other low-quality products. Wefirst find that for a large class of environments, free trade is the trading system that conveysthe highest incentives to produce non-tainted high-quality goods by foreign exporters.However, free trade...

Most people in rural China have no plans for retirement other than the ingrained Chinese tradition that children care for old parents. Actually there are also no sources of social support such as social old-age insurance to rely on in rural people’ old age for a long time in China. In 1992, a...

It is widely believed by development economists that the role of human capital is one of the most fundamental determinants of economic growth. Sustained growth depends on the level of human capital whose stocks increase due to better education, higher levels of health, new learning and training...

This paper uses data from Jordan’s 2007 Demographic and Health Survey to reassess the main determinants of child mortality in this middle-income country. Running different logit estimations to allow for different time windows and sets of variables, we find that behavioural factors have gained...