The main objectives of this paper are to estimate the burden of tobacco-caused mortality as a whole and by main tobacco-related diseases in Kazakhstan, the Russian Federation, and Ukraine, and to assess the distributional health impact of an increase in tobacco taxation in these three countries....

Laboratories have historically been under supported in developing country health systems resulting in poor quality diagnosis and inadequate disease surveillance. Laboratory professionals are predominantly male with relatively limited female labor participation, with potential gender based...

Increasing costs of treatments have led to the apparition of the medical tourism. Patients in high-income countries seek to solve their health problems in developing countries where the cost of medical treatment is much lower. This cost difference has led to the medical tourism industry that is...

Does culture, and in particular religion, exert an independent causal effect on long-term economic growth, or do culture and religion merely reflect the latter? We explore this issue by studying the case of Protestantism in China during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries....

We estimate the willingness to pay (WTP) of individuals to have increased spatial access to hospitals using a spatial hedonic price model. Employing a dataset of over 90,000 detailed housing observations, we find that WTP of individuals to live one mile closer to a hospital is positive if the...

Investment in human development is considered a means of improving the quality of life and sustaining economic growth in the Caribbean. The purpose of this paper is to assess the efficacy of public spending on health care and education by evaluating the life expectancy and school enrolment rates...