Previous Journal Articles

2012

Das, J., A. Holla, et al. (2012). "In Urban And Rural India, A Standardized Patient Study Showed Low Levels Of Provider Training And Huge Quality Gaps." Health Affairs 31(12): 2774-2784.
This article reports on the quality of care delivered by private and public providers of primary health care services in rural and urban India. To measure quality, the study used standardized patients recruited from the local community and trained to present consistent cases of illness to providers. We found low overall levels of medical training among health care providers; in rural Madhya Pradesh, for example, 67 percent of health care providers who were sampled reported no medical qualifications at all. What’s more, we found only small differences between trained and untrained doctors in such areas as adherence to clinical checklists. Correct diagnoses were rare, incorrect treatments were widely prescribed, and adherence to clinical checklists was higher in private than in public clinics.

Chiburis, R. C., J. Das, et al. (2012). "A practical comparison of the bivariate probit and linear IV estimators." Economics Letters 117(3): 762-766.
This paper compares asymptotic and finite sample properties of linear IV and bivariate probit in models with an endogenous binary treatment and binary outcome. The results provide guidance on the choice of model specification and help to explain large differences in the estimates depending on the specification chosen...

Filmer, D. and K. Scott (2012). "Assessing asset indices." Demography 49(1): 359-392.
The use of asset indices in welfare analysis and poverty targeting is increasing, especially in cases in which data on expenditures are unavailable or hard to collect. We compare alternative approaches to welfare measurement. Our analysis shows that inferences about inequalities in education, health care use, fertility, and child mortality, as well as labor market outcomes, are quite robust to the economic status measure used. Different measures—most significantly per capita expenditures versus the class of asset indices—do not, however, yield identical household rankings. Two factors stand out in predicting the degree of congruence in rankings. First is the extent to which expenditures can be explained by observed household and community characteristics...

Das, J., R. K. Das, et al. (2012). "The mental health gender-gap in urban India: Patterns and narratives." Social Science & Medicine 75(9): 1660–1672.
Women report significantly higher levels of mental distress than men in community studies around the world. We provide further evidence on the origins of this mental health gender-gap using data from 789 adults, primarily spousal pairs, from 300 families in Delhi, India. These data were collected between 2001 and 2003. We first confirm that, like in other studies, women report higher levels of mental distress and that gender differences in education, household expenditures and age do not explain the mental health gender-gap. In contrast, women report significantly higher levels of distress than men in families with adverse reproductive outcomes, particularly the death of a child...

Kazianga, H., D. de Walque, et al. (2012). "Educational and Child Labour Impacts of Two Food for Education Schemes: Evidence from a Randomized Trial in Rural Burkina Faso." Journal of African Economies 21(5): 723–760.
This paper uses a prospective randomised trial to assess the impact of two food-for-education schemes on education and child labour outcomes for children from low-income households in northern rural Burkina Faso. The two food-for-education programmes under consideration are, on the one hand, school meals where students are provided with lunch each school day, and, on the other hand, take-home rations which provide girls with 10 kg of cereal flour each month, conditional on 90% attendance rate. After the programme ran for one academic year, both programmes increased enrolment by 3–5 percentage points. The scores on mathematics improved for girls in both school meals and take-home rations villages...

Gauri, V. and S. Gloppen (2012). "Human Rights Based Approaches to Development: Concepts, Evidence, and Policy " Polity 44(4): 485–503.
This article aims to organize thinking around human rights-based approaches to development (HRBAs) and to review available empirical evidence regarding their benefits, risks, and limitations. We propose a typology distinguishing four types of rights-based approaches: global compliance based on international and regional treaties; human rights-based programming on the part of donors and governments; rights talk; and legal mobilization. The article briefly reviews the politics of the first three modalities before examining legal mobilization for social and economic rights in greater detail...

Andrabi, T., J. Das, et al. (2012). "What Did You Do All Day? Maternal Education and Child Outcomes." The Journal of Human Resources 47(4): 873-912.
Does maternal education have an impact on children's educational outcomes even at the very low levels found in many developing countries? We use instrumental variables analysis to address this issue in Pakistan. We find that children of mothers with some education spend 72 more minutes per day on educational activities at home. Mothers with some education also spend more time helping their children with school work. In the subset that have test scores available, children whose mothers have some education have higher scores by 0.23–0.35 standard deviations. We do not find support for channels through which education affects bargaining power within the household...

Balan, D. J. and S. Knack (2012). "The Correlation between Human Capital and Morality and Its Effect on Economic Performance: Theory and Evidence." Journal of Comparative Economics 40(3): 457-475.
In this paper, we analyze the relationship between the correlation between morality and human capital ("ability") on the one hand and aggregate economic performance on the other. Morality is defined as an aversion to consuming goods obtained through appropriative rather than productive activities. In our empirical analysis, we adapt the well-known regression framework of Rodrik et al. (2004), using the World Values Survey as a source of proxies for morality. Using our preferred proxy, we find evidence that higher within-country correlation between morality and ability, holding constant the levels of morality and ability, increases per-capita income levels...

Paxton, P. and S. Knack (2012). "Individual and Country-Level Factors Affecting Support for Foreign Aid." International Political Science Review 33(2): 171-192.
The determinants of public opinion on foreign aid in donor countries have received little attention. This paper examines support for foreign aid with a large, multi-level, cross-national study. Hypotheses are tested with multi-level models, including both individual-level and country-level variables, to predict positive attitudes. Two datasets are used to measure attitudes in donor countries: (1) the 1995 World Values Survey, which has information from approximately 6,000 individuals in nine countries and asks a rich battery of questions at the individual level; (2) the 2002 Gallup Voice of the People survey, asks fewer questions of individuals but contains 17 donor countries. Using both surveys combines their distinct strengths and allows tests of individual- and national-level theories across disparate samples...

de Walque, D., H. Kazianga, et al. (2012). "Antiretroviral Therapy Perceived Efficacy and Risky Sexual Behaviors: Evidence from Mozambique." Economic Development and Cultural Change 61(1): 97-126.
This paper studies the effect of increased access to antiretroviral therapy (ART) for AIDS on self-reported risky sexual behavior, using data collected in Mozambique in 2007 and 2008. The survey sampled both households from randomly selected HIV positive individuals and comparison households from the general population. Controlling for unobserved individual characteristics, our findings support the hypothesis of disinhibition behaviors, in which people report more sexual risk taking when they perceive ART as more efficacious...

Akresh, R., E. Bagby, et al. (2012). "Child Ability and Household Human Capital Investment Decisions in Burkina Faso." Economic Development and Cultural Change 61(1): 157-186.
Using data we collected in Burkina Faso, we explore how child ability influences parents’ decisions to invest in their children’s human capital. We use a direct measure of child ability for all primary school–aged children, regardless of current school enrollment. We explicitly incorporate direct measures of the ability of each child’s siblings (both absolute and relative measures) to show how sibling rivalry exerts an impact on the parents’ decision of whether and how much to invest in their child’s education...

Packel, L., A. Keller, et al. (2012). "Evolving Strategies, Opportunistic Implementation: HIV Risk Reduction in Tanzania in the Context of an Incentive-Based HIV Prevention Intervention." PLOS One, 7(8), 1-10.
Behavior change communication (BCC) interventions, while still a necessary component of HIV prevention, have not on their own been shown to be sufficient to stem the tide of the epidemic. The shortcomings of BCC interventions are partly due to barriers arising from structural or economic constraints. Arguments are being made for combination prevention packages that include behavior change, biomedical, and structural interventions to address the complex set of risk factors that may lead to HIV infection...

Das, J., P. Pandey, et al. (2012). "Learning Levels and Gaps in Pakistan: A Comparison with Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh." Economic and Political Weekly XLVII(26/27), 228-40.
This paper reports on student achievement in public and private primary schools in rural Pakistan and compares the findings with those rom Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh. In Pakistan, absolute learning is low and the largest gaps are between good and bad government schools. The gap between children with literate and illiterate mothers is huge. Tested at the end of Grade 3, a bare majority of children have mastered the K-1 mathematics curriculum and only 31% can correctly form a sentence with the word "school" in Urdu. The gap in English test-scores between government and private schools is 12 times the gap between children from rich and poor families. Data from Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh suggest similar levels of learning and educational gaps...

Das, J., J. Hammer, C. Sanchez-Paramo (2012). "The impact of recall periods on reported morbidity and health seeking behavior." Journal of Development Economics 98(1): 76-88.
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 recall periods in the second half of the survey. This paper shows that the length of the recall period had a large impact on reported morbidity, doctor visits, time spent sick, whether at least one day of work/school was lost due to sickness, and the reported use of self-medication...

Zhang, J., J. Giles, et al. (2012). "Does it pay to be a cadre? Estimating the returns to being a local official in rural China." Journal of Comparative Economics 40(3): 337-356.
Recruiting and retaining leaders and public servants at the grass-roots level in developing countries creates a potential tension between providing sufficient returns to attract talent and limiting the scope for excessive rent-seeking behavior. In China, researchers have frequently argued that village cadres, who are the lowest level of administrators in rural areas, exploit personal political status for economic gain. Much existing research, however, compares the earnings of cadre and non-cadre households in rural China without controlling for unobserved dimensions of ability that are also correlated with success as entrepreneurs or in non-agricultural activities...

Wagstaff, A. (2012). "Benefit-incidence analysis: are government health expenditures more pro-rich than we think?" Health Economics 21(4): 351-366.
Authors of benefit-incidence analyses (BIA) have to impute subsidies using assumptions about the relationship between unobserved subsidies ‘captured’ by the household and what can be observed at the household and aggregate levels. This paper shows that one of the two assumptions used in BIA studies to date will necessarily produce a more pro-rich (or less pro-poor) picture of government health spending than the other, depending on whether utilization is more pro-rich or pro-poor than fees paid to public providers....

Corno, L., and  D. de Walque (2012). "Mines, Migration and HIV/AIDS in Southern Africa." Journal of African Economies 21(3): 465-498.
Swaziland and Lesotho are the countries with the highest HIV prevalence in the world. These countries have in common another distinguishing feature: during the past century, they sent massive numbers of migrant workers into South African mines. This paper examines whether mining activities in a bordering country affect HIV infections. A job in the mines implies spending a long period away from the household of origin surrounded by an active sex industry. This creates potential incentives for multiple concurrent partnerships. Using Demographic and Health Surveys, the analysis shows that migrant miners aged 3044 are 15 percentage points more likely to be HIV positive and having a migrant miner as a partner increases the probability of infection for women by 8 percentage points...

Wagstaff, A. and A. Culyer (2012). "Four decades of health economics through a bibliometric lens." Journal of Health Economics 31(2): 406–439.
In this paper, we take a bibliometric tour of the last forty years of health economics using bibliographic “metadata” from EconLit supplemented by citation data from Google Scholar and our own topical classifications. We report the growth of health economics (we find 33,000 publications since 1969—12,000 more than in the economics of education) and list the 300 most-cited publications broken down by topic.We report the changing topical and geographic focus of health economics (the topics ‘Determinants of health and ill-health’ and ‘Health statistics and econometrics’ both show an upward trend, and the field has expanded appreciably into the developing world)...

de Walque, D. and R. Kline (2012). "The Association Between Remarriage and HIV Infection in 13 Sub-Saharan African Countries." Studies in Family Planning 43(1): 1-10.
Separated, divorced, and widowed individuals in Africa are at significantly increased risk for HIV infection. Using nationally representative data from 13 sub-Saharan African countries, this study confirms that finding and goes further by examining those who have experienced a marital dissolution and are now remarried. Results show that remarried individuals form a large portion of the population and have a higher-than-average HIV prevalence. HIV-positive remarried individuals are at risk of transmitting the infection to their spouse, because many of the couples are serodiscordant. The large number of high-risk remarried individuals is a source of vulnerability and further infection, and should be acknowledged and taken into account by prevention strategies that rarely address this population...

de Walque, D., W. H. Dow, et al. (2012). "Incentivising safe sex: a randomised trial of conditional cash transfers for HIV and sexually transmitted infection prevention in rural Tanzania." BMJ 2(1): 1-10.
Objective: The authors evaluated the use of conditional cash transfers as an HIV and sexually transmitted infection prevention strategy to incentivise safe sex.
Design: An unblinded, individually randomised and controlled trial.
Setting: 10 villages within the Kilombero/Ulanga districts of the Ifakara Health and Demographic Surveillance System in rural south-west Tanzania.
Participants: The authors enrolled 2399 participants,aged 18-30 years, including adult spouses...

2011

Ravallion, M. and A. Wagstaff. (Forthcoming (online December 3, 2011)). "The World Bank’s publication record." The Review of International Organizations.
The World Bank claims to be a “knowledge bank,” but do its knowledge products influence development thinking, or is the Bank merely a proselytizer? The World Bank is a prolific publisher; for example, it has published more journal articles in economics than any university except Harvard. But what about their impact on development thinking? Using citation data from Google Scholar it is hard to discern more than a negligible impact for a great many Bank publications. However, a sizeable minority of its journal articles and books have been highly cited. Compared to leading research universities and other international institutions, the Bank’s ranking in terms of widely-used citation-based indices is no lower than for its journal article counts. This suggests that the Bank’s research does much more than proselytize...

Knack, S., F. H. Rogers, et al. (2011). "Aid Quality and Donor Rankings." World Development 39(11): 1907-1917.
This paper offers new measures of aid quality covering 38 bilateral and multilateral donors, as well as new insights about the robustness and usefulness of such measures. The 2005 Paris Declaration on Aid effectiveness and the follow-up 2008 Accra Agenda for Action have focused attention on common donor practices that reduce the development impact of aid. Using 18 underlying indicators that capture these practices—derived from the OECD-DAC’s Survey for Monitoring the Paris Declaration, the new AidData database,and the DAC aid tables—the authors construct an overall aid quality index and four coherently defined sub-indexes on aid selectivity, alignment, harmonization, and specialization...

Lund, C., M. De Silva, et al. (2011). "Poverty and mental disorders: breaking the cycle in low-income and middle-income countries." Lancet 378(9801): 1502-1514. 
Growing international evidence shows that mental ill health and poverty interact in a negative cycle in low-income and middle-income countries. However, little is known about the interventions that are needed to break this cycle. We undertook two systematic reviews to assess the effect of financial poverty alleviation interventions on mental, neurological, and substance misuse disorders and the effect of mental health interventions on individual and family or carer economic status in countries with low and middle incomes. We found that the mental health effect of poverty alleviation interventions was inconclusive, although some conditional cash transfer and asset promotion programmes had mental health benefits. By contrast, mental health interventions were associated with improved economic outcomes in all studies, although the difference was not statistically significant in every study... 

Wagstaff, A. (2011). "Reply to Guido Erreygers and Tom Van Ourti's comment on ‘The concentration index of a binary outcome revisited’ " Health Economics 20(10): 1166–1168.
Erreygers and Van Ourti’s (2011b) comment on my paper (Wagstaff, 2011) leaves me with the overall impression that a consensus is emerging on some key issues in this field and that the areas of disagreement are narrowing.
  The main claim of my paper was that binary variables are amenable to both relative and absolute inequality analyses, which have the properties of a ratio‐scale variable.
  In their comment, Erreygers and Van Ourti said that they agree that a binary variable can be used in an inequality analysis. In their earlier paper (Erreygers and Van Ourti, 2011a), they could perhaps have been a little clearer on this point...

Wagstaff, A. (2011). "The concentration index of a binary outcome revisited." Health Economics 20(10): 1155-1160.
The binary variable is one of the most common types of variables in the analysis of income-related health inequalities. I argue that while the binary variable has some unusual properties, it shares many of the properties of the ratio–scale variable and hence lends itself to both relative and absolute inequality analyses, albeit with some qualifications. I argue that criticisms of the normalization I proposed in an earlier paper, and of the use of the binary variable for inequality analysis, stem from a misrepresentation of the properties of the binary variable, as well as a switch of focus away from relative inequality to absolute inequality. I concede that my normalization is not uncontentious, but, in a way, that has not previously been noted...

Benjamin, D., L. Brandt, J. Giles (2011). "Did Higher Iinequality Impede Growth in Rural China?" The Economic Journal 121(557): 1281–1309.
We estimate the relationship between village inequality and subsequent income growth for households in rural China. Using a longitudinal household-level survey spanning 1987-2002, we find that households from higher inequality villages experienced lower income growth. However, the effect of local inequality fades by 2002. Our evidence points to unobserved village institutions at the time of economic reforms, associated with household access to higher income activities, as the source of the link between inequality and growth. We address several econometric issues including measurement error and attrition, but underscore others that are probably intractable for all investigations of the inequality-growth relationship...

Das, J. and J. Leino (2011). "Evaluating the RSBY: Lessons from an Experimental Information Campaign." Economic & Political Weekly 46(32): 85-93.
Launched in 2008, the Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana provides financial protection from health shocks for poor households. This paper discusses findings from an experimental information and education campaign and household survey carried out in the first year of the programme in Delhi. First, the iec had no impact on enrolment, but households who were part of the household survey sample and therefore received information closer to the enrolment period were 60% more likely to enrol. Second, there is little evidence that the insurance company selectively enrolled healthier households. Instead, hospital claims were lower for households who received the iec and for households who received both the survey and the iec, suggesting that the marginal household enrolled was in fact healthier. Implications for the programme and its evaluation are discussed in the light of these findings...

Andrabi, T., J. Das, et al. (2011). "Do Value-Added Estimates Add Value ? Accounting for Learning Dynamics." American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 3(3): 29-54.
This paper illustrates the central role of persistence in estimating and interpreting value-added models of learning. Using data from Pakistani public and private schools, we apply dynamic panel methods that address three key empirical challenges: imperfect persistence, unobserved heterogeneity, and measurement error. Our estimates suggest that only one-fifth to one-half of learning persists between grades and that private schools increase average achievement by 0.25 standard deviations each year. In contrast, value-added models that assume perfect persistence yield severely downward estimates of the private school effect. Models that ignore unobserved heterogeneity or measurement error produce biased estimates of persistence...

Robinson, N. and V. Gauri (2011). "Education, Labor Rights, and Incentives: Contract Teacher Cases in the Indian Courts." Comparative Law and Labour Policy Journal 32 (4):991-1022.
Since the liberalization of India’s economy beginning in the early 1990s, the government has increasingly employed contract workers to perform various state functions, from cleaning sewers to collecting taxes. The education sector has been no different. Contract, or ad hoc, teachers have become an ever-more-visible face in India’s public schools.
Debates over the merit of these teachers have been fierce. Proponents of contract teachers view them as a way to bypass what they see as underperforming regular teachers. Opponents argue that contract teachers are unfairly paid less than regular teachers for the same kind of work, are subject to arbitrary dismissals and harassment, and do not teach as well as regular teachers...

Ravallion, M. and A. Wagstaff (2011). "On measuring scholarly influence by citations." Scientometrics 88(1): 321-337.
Bibliometric measures based on citations are widely used in assessing the scientific publication records of authors, institutions and journals. Yet currently favored measures lack a clear theoretical foundation and are known to have counter-intuitive properties. The paper proposes a new approach that is grounded on a theoretical “influence function,” representing explicit prior beliefs about how citations reflect influence. Conditions are derived for robust qualitative comparisons of influence—conditions that can be implemented using readily-available data. Two examples are provided, one using the world’s top-10 economics department, the other using the top-10 economics journals...

Das, J. (2011). "The Quality of Medical Care in Low-Income Countries: From Providers to Markets." PLOS Medicine 8(4): 1-2.
It is widely believed that people in lowand middle-income countries (LMICs) are in poor health because they cannot reach medical services on time. Predicated on this belief, much of global health policy focuses on the physical provision of goods (clinics, equipment, and medicine) and getting doctors to ‘‘underserved’’ rural areas. Yet, recent evidence shows high utilization rates, even among the poor...

de Walque, D. and R. Kline (2011). "Variations in Condom Use by Type of Partner in 13 Sub-Saharan African Countries." Studies in Family Planning 42(1): 1-10.
Using nationally representative data from 13 sub-Saharan African countries, we reinforce and expand upon previous findings that men report using condoms more frequently than women do and that unmarried respondents report that they use condoms with casual partners more frequently than married individuals report using them with their spouses. Based on descriptive, bivariate, and multivariate analyses, we also demonstrate to a degree not previously shown in the current literature that married men from most countries report using condoms with extramarital partners about as frequently as unmarried men report using them with casual partners. Married women from most of the countries included in the study reported using condoms with extramarital partners less frequently than unmarried women reported using them with casual partners. This result is especially troubling because marriage usually ensures regular sexual intercourse, thereby providing more opportunities for a person to pass HIV infection from an extramarital partner to his or her spouse...

Gauri, V. (2011). "The cost of complying with human rights treaties: The convention on the rights of the child and basic immunization " The Review of International Organizations 6(1): 33-56.
The determinants of compliance with human rights treaties likely vary according to the right in question, yet heterogeneity in the pathways through which ratification affects various human rights outcomes has received limited attention. This paper first develops an account of treaty compliance that incorporates the intrinsic benefits to the state of compliance, regime costs associated with certain rights, the political costs that NGOs, judges, and others are able to impose for non-compliance, and the fiscal and economic costs of compliance. The paper argues that for child survival rights, fiscal and economic costs are likely to be dispositive, and that as a result richer countries are more likely to comply...

de Brauw, A. and R. Mu (2011). "Migration and the overweight and underweight status of children in rural China " Food Policy 36(1): 88-100.
The rapid economic growth in China is accompanied by a large scale rural-to-urban migration, but over time more children are left behind rural areas. This paper studies how the overweight and underweight status of the rural children is associated with the out migration of others in their household. We find that migration is related to different nutritional outcomes for the left-behind children...

Pop-Eleches, C., H. Thirumurthy, et al. (2011). "Mobile phone technologies improve adherence to antiretroviral treatment in a resource-limited setting: a randomized controlled trial of text message reminders." AIDS 25(00): 1-10.
Objective: There is limited evidence on whether growing mobile phone availability in sub-Saharan Africa can be used to promote high adherence to antiretroviral therapy (ART). This study tested the efficacy of short message service (SMS) reminders on adherence to ART among patients attending a rural clinic in Kenya...

Mu, R. and D. van de Walle (2011). "Left Behind to Farm? Women’s Labor Re-allocation in Rural China." Labour Economics.18(1): S83-S97.
The transformation of work during China's rapid economic development is associated with a substantial but little noticed re-allocation of traditional farm labor among women, with some doing much less and some much more. We study how the health, work and time allocation of non-migrant women are affected by the migration of others in their household. We find little impact on their health outcomes but do find that the women left behind are doing more farm work than would have otherwise been the case. We show that this may be a persistent effect, and not just temporary re-allocation. In stark contrast, no such impacts are found for left-behind men.

Wagstaff, A. (2011). "Fungibility and the impact of development assistance: Evidence from Vietnam's health sector." Journal of Development Economics 94(1):62-73.
The apparent fungibility of aid is a challenge to the evaluation of donor-funded development projects, requiring a comparison of the observed outcomes with the outcomes that would have occurred if the project had not gone ahead. Where projects are targeted on specific geographic areas, counterfactual outcomes in each can differ from observed outcomes because the amount of government spending (gross of aid) differs, the productivity of government spending differs, or both. This paper estimates the benefits of two concurrent World Bank health projects in Vietnam targeted on specific provinces...

2010

Giles, J., D. Wang, C. Zhao (2010). "Can China's rural elderly count on support from adult children? Implications of rural-to-urban migration." Journal of Population Ageing 3(3-4): 183-204.
This paper shows that the family continues to be an important source of support for the rural elderly, particularly the rural elderly over 70 years of age. Decline in likelihood of co-residence with, or in close proximity to, adult children raises the possibility that China’s rural elderly will receive less support in the forms of both income and in-kind instrumental care. While descriptive evidence on net-financial transfers suggests that elderly with migrant children will receive similar levels of financial transfers as those without migrant children, the predicted variance associated with these transfers implies a higher risk that elderly who have migrant children could fall into poverty. Reducing the risk of low incomes among the elderly is one important motive for new rural pension initiatives supported by China’s government, which are scheduled to be expanded to cover all rural counties by the end of the 12th Five Year Plan in 2016...

Beegle, K., D. Filmer, et al. (2010). "Orphanhood and the Living Arrangements of Children in Sub-Saharan Africa." World Development 38(12): 1727-1746.
Increasing adult mortality due to HIV/AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa raises considerable concern about the welfare of surviving children. Studies have found substantial variability across countries in the negative impacts of orphanhood on child health and education. One hypothesis for this variability is the resilience of the extended family network in some countries to care for orphans—networks under increasing pressure by the sheer number of orphans in many settings. Using household survey data from 21 countries in Africa, this study examines trends in orphanhood and living arrangements, and the links between the two. The findings confirm that orphanhood is increasing, although not all countries are experiencing rapid rises...

Huang, J., H. Zhi, et al. (2010). "The impact of the global financial crisis on off-farm employment and earnings in rural China." World Development.
This paper examines the effect of the financial crisis on off-farm employment of China’s rural labor force. Using a national representative dataset, we find that there was a large impact. By April 2009 off-farm employment reached 6.8% of the rural labor force. Monthly earnings also declined. However, while we estimate that 49 million were laid-off between October 2008 and April 2009, half of them were re-hired in off-farm work by April 2009. By August 2009, less than 2% of the rural labor force was unemployed due to the crisis. The robust recovery appears to have helped avoid instability...

Eyawo, O., D. de Walque, et al. (2010). "HIV status in discordant couples in sub-Saharan Africa: a systematic review and meta-analysis." Lancet Infect Dis 10(11):770–77.
Most couples affected by HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa live in discordant relationships. Men are thought to be the index case in most relationships, and most social marketing and awareness campaigns are focused on men. We investigated serodiscordance in stable relationships to establish the gender balance of index-case infections. The proportion of HIV-positive women in stable heterosexual serodiscordant relationships was 47%, which shows that women are as likely as men to be the index partner in a discordant couple. Our study shows the need to focus on both sexes in HIV prevention strategies...

Moreno-Serra, R. and A. Wagstaff (2010). "System-wide impacts of hospital payment reforms: Evidence from Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia." Journal of Health Economics 29(4):585-602.
While there is broad agreement that the way that health care providers are paid affects their performance, the empirical literature on the impacts of provider payment reforms is surprisingly thin. During the 1990s and early 2000s, many European and Central Asian (ECA) countries shifted from paying hospitals through historical budgets to fee-for-service (FFS) or patient-based payment (PBP) methods (mostly variants of diagnosis-related groups, or DRGs). Using panel data on 28 countries over the period 1990–2004, we exploit the phased shift from historical budgets to explore aggregate impacts on hospital throughput, national health spending, and mortality from causes amenable to medical care...

Mok, E. A., L. O. Gostin, et al. (2010). "Implementing Public Health Regulations in Developing Countries: Lessons from the OECD Countries." Journal of Law Medicine & Ethics 38(3):508-519.
Developing country efforts to enforce basic public health standards are often hindered by limited agency resources and poorly designed enforcement mechanisms, including excessive reliance on slow and erratic judicial systems. Traditional public health regulation can therefore be difficult to implement. This article examines innovative approaches to the implementation of public health regulations that have emerged in recent years within the OECD countries...

Das Gupta, M. (2010). "Family Systems, Political Systems and Asia's 'Missing Girls'." Asian Population Studies 6(2):123-152.
China, South Korea and northwest India manifest extreme child sex ratios. This paper argues that this is because their pre-modern political and administrative systems used patrilineages to organise their citizens, generating uniquely rigid patriliny and son preference. It also argues that the advent of the modern state has unravelled the underpinnings of the rigid patriliny, unleashing forces that reduce son preference...

Chung, W. and M. D. Gupta (2010). "Factors influencing ‘missing girls’ in South Korea." Applied Economics 1-14.
Despite the massive attention drawn to 'missing girls,' there has been no study that specifically focuses on the association between childlessness and the daughter deficit. Using a bivariate probit selection model, this article analysed the data for 6475 married women aged 15-49 years collected from the 2003 Korea National Fertility and Family Health Survey. The results showed that a couple's decision to have a child exerted a significant influence on its daughter deficit. This study also found that the effect of a woman's education on daughter deficit did not correspond to that of her husband's level of education...

de Walque, D. (2010). "Education, Information, and Smoking Decisions: Evidence from Smoking Histories in the United States, 1940–2000." J. Human Resources 45(3):682-717.
This paper tests the hypothesis that education improves health and increases life expectancy. The analysis of smoking histories shows that after 1950, when information about the dangers of tobacco started to diffuse, the prevalence of smoking declined earlier and most dramatically for college graduates. I construct panels based on smoking histories in an attempt to isolate the causal effect of smoking from the influence of timeinvariant unobservable characteristics...

Langbein, L. and S. Knack (2010). "The Worldwide Governance Indicators: Six, One, or None?" Journal of Development Studies 46(2): 350-370.
Aggregate indexes of the quality of governance, covering large samples of countries, have become popular in comparative political analysis. Few studies examine the validity or reliability of these indexes. To partially fill this gap, this study uses factor, confirmatory factor and path analysis to test both measurement and causal models of the six Worldwide Governance indicators. They purportedly measure distinct concepts of control of corruption, rule of law, government effectiveness, rule quality, political stability, and voice and accountability…

Das, J. (2010). "Improving Immunisation Coverage in Rural India." British Medical Journal 340 (C2553).
Despite decades of rhetoric about improving health and two decades of economic growth, vaccination rates in India remain low. As in Ethiopia, Burkina Faso, and Afghanistan, measles vaccination rates in India are around 70%, and only 44% of children aged 1-2 years are fully immunised. Low vaccination rates have been alternately blamed on insufficient public funds, poor implementation of vaccination programmes, and a general apathy towards the health of the poor. Yet, we have remarkably little evidence to help us separate problems with implementation of vaccination programmes from design flaws that restrict take-up...

Bandiera, O., R. Burgess, et al. (2010). "Intentions to Participate in Adolescent Training Programs: Evidence from Uganda." Journal of the European Economic Association 8 (2-3):548-60.
Almost one-third of the population in developing countries is under age 15. Hence improving the effectiveness of policy interventions that target adolescents might be especially important. We analyze the intention to participate in training programs of adolescent girls in Uganda, a country with perhaps the most skewed age distribution anywhere in the world. The training program we focus on is BRAC's Adolescent Development Program, which emphasizes the provision of life skills, entrepreneurship training, and microfinance. We find that girls who are more likely to benefit from the program are more likely to intend to participate...

Ban, R. D., M. Das Gupta, et al. (2010). "The Political Economy of Village Sanitation in South India: Capture or Poor Information?" Journal of Development Studies 46(4): 685-700.
Despite efforts to mandate and finance local governments' provision of environmental sanitation services, outcomes remain poor in the villages surveyed in the four South Indian states. The analysis indicates some key issues that appear to hinder improvements in sanitation. Local politicians tend to capture sanitary infrastructure and cleaning services for themselves, while also keeping major village roads reasonably well-served...

Das Gupta, M., B. R. Desikachari, et al. (2010). "How Might India’s Public Health Systems Be Strengthened?: lessons from Tamil Nadu." Economic and Political Weekly 45(10): 46-60.
The central government’s policies have inadvertently de-emphasised environmental health and other preventive public health services in India since the 1950s. Diseases resulting from insanitary conditions impose high costs even among the more affluent, and rapid urbanisation increases the potential for disease spread. We analyse the central government’s policies and then describe Tamil Nadu’s public health system, which offers basic principles for strengthening public health within the administrative and fiscal resources available to most states...

Lambert, S., M. Ravallion, D. van de Walle (2010). "A Micro-Decomposition Analysis of Aggregate Human Development Outcomes." Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics 72(2):119-145.
We show how differences in aggregate human development outcomes over time and space can be additively decomposed into a pure mean income (growth) component, a component attributed to differences in the distribution of income, and components attributed to ‘non-income’ factors and differences in the model linking outcomes to income and non-income characteristics. The income effect at the micro level is modelled non-parametrically, so as to flexibly reflect potentially complex distributional changes. Our proposed method is illustrated using data for Morocco and Vietnam, and the results offer some surprising insights into the observed aggregate gains in schooling attainments...

Gauri, V. (2010).  "Customary Law and Economic Outcomes in Indonesia." Hague Journal on the Rule of Law 2(1):75-94.
This paper develops a framework and some hypotheses regarding the impact of local-level, informal legal institutions on three economic outcomes: aggregate growth, inequality, and human capabilities. It presents a set of stylized differences between formal and informal legal systems, identifies the pathways through which formal systems promote economic outcomes, reflects on what the stylized differences mean for the potential impact of informal legal institutions on economic outcomes, and looks at extant case studies to examine the plausibility of the arguments presented...

Das , J. and T. Zajonc (2010). "India shining and Bharat drowning: Comparing two Indian states to the worldwide distribution in mathematics achievement." Journal of Development Economics 92(2): 175-187.
Increasing evidence suggests that the level and distribution of cognitive skills is more important to economic development than absolute measures of schooling attainment, and that income and skill inequality are inextricably linked. Yet for most of the developing world no internationally comparable estimates of cognitive skills exist. This paper uses student answers to publicly released questions from an international testing agency together with statistical methods from Item Response Theory to place secondary students from two Indian states—Orissa and Rajasthan—on a worldwide distribution of mathematics achievement...

Wagstaff, A. (2010). "Social health insurance reexamined." Health Economics 19(5):503-517.
Social health insurance (SHI) is enjoying something of a revival in parts of the developing world. Many countries that have in the past relied largely on tax finance (and out-of-pocket payments) have introduced SHI, or are thinking about doing so. And countries with SHI already in place are making vigorous efforts to extend coverage to the informal sector…

Duclos, J.-Y., A. Araar and J. Giles (2010). "Chronic and Transient Poverty: Measurement and Estimation, with Evidence from China." Journal of Development Economics 91(2):266-77.
The paper contributes to the measurement of poverty and vulnerability in three ways. First, it proposes a new approach to separating poverty into chronic and transient components. Second, it provides corrections for the statistical biases introduced when using a small number of periods to estimate the importance of vulnerability and transient poverty...

Wagstaff, A. (2010). "Estimating Health Insurance Impacts under Unobserved Heterogeneity: The Case of Vietnam's Health Care Fund for the Poor." Health Economics 19(2):189-208.
Vietnam's health care fund for the poor (HCFP) uses government revenues to finance health care for the poor, ethnic minorities living in selected mountainous provinces, and all households living in communes officially designated as highly disadvantaged. As of 2006, the program, which started in 2003, covered around 60% of those eligible. Those who were covered (about 20% of the population) were disproportionately poor, and around 80% of those covered were eligible…

Banerjee, A. V., R. Banerji, E. Duflo, R. Glennerster and S. Khemani (2010). "Pitfalls of Participatory Programs: Evidence from a Randomized Evaluation in Education in India." American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 2(1):1-30.
Participation of beneficiaries in the monitoring of public services is increasingly seen as a key to improving their quality. We conducted a randomized evaluation of three interventions to encourage beneficiaries' participation to India: providing information on existing institutions, training community members in a testing tool for children, and training volunteers to hold remedial reading camps. These interventions had no impact on community involvement, teacher effort, or learning outcomes inside the school…

de Walque, D. and P. Verwimp (2010). "The Demographic and Socio-economic Distribution of Excess Mortality during the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda." Journal of African Economies 19(2): 141-162.
This paper studies the demographic consequences of the Rwandan genocide and how the excess mortality due to the conflict was distributed in the population. Data collected by the 2000 Demographic and Health Survey indicate that although there were more deaths across the entire population, adult males were the most likely to die. Using the characteristics of the survey respondent as a proxy for the socio-economic status of the victims' family, the results also show that individuals with an urban or more educated background were more likely to die…

Alderman, H. (2010). "The economic cost of a poor start to life." Journal of Developmental Origins of Health and Disease 1(1):19-25.
A primary challenge for nutrition policy in low-income settings is to position nutrition as an investment rather than simply as a form of social spending that governments grant poor people to the degree that governments prioritize equity. Various economic models have produced estimates of the economic costs of malnutrition as a combination of the impact of malnutrition on mortality, on health care costs for the survivors, including those that manifest in adult years, and on the lost productivity attributable to malnutrition. However, these estimates often center on the costs of early mortality and are sensitive to assumptions on how to place a dollar cost on mortality...

Alderman, H. (2010). "Safety nets can help address the risks to nutrition from increasing climate variability." J Nutr 140(1):148S-52S
Models of climate change predict increased variability of weather as well as changes in agro-ecology. The increased variability will pose special challenges for nutrition. This study reviews evidence on climate shocks and nutrition and estimates the economic consequences in terms of reduced schooling and economic productivity stemming from nutritional insults in childhood...

Gauri, V. (2010). "Fundamental Rights and Public Interest Litigation in India: Overreaching or Underachieving?." The Indian Journal of Law and Economics 1(1): 71-93.
The global reputation of Indian courts, and perhaps their national reputation as well, as judicial innovators and as defenders of the interests of the disadvantaged and downtrodden, rests largely on Public Interest Litigation (PIL), a new set of procedures for expanding access to justice that were developed some thirty years ago. Although assessments of PIL in India range from the laudatory to the cynical, recent scholarship has developed a widely held narrative that runs as follows.1 PIL or “social action litigation,” as some call it, originated in the late 1970s when the judiciary, aiming to recapture popular support after its complicity in Indira Gandhi’s declaration of emergency rule, encouraged litigation concerning the interests of the poor and marginalized, and to do so loosened rules and traditions related to standing, case filing, the adversarial process, and judicial remedies...

de Pee, S., H. J. Brinkman, et al. (2010). "How to ensure nutrition security in the global economic crisis to protect and enhance development of young children and our common future." J Nutr 140(1):138S-42S.
The global economic crisis, commodity price hikes, and climate change have worsened the position of the poorest and most vulnerable people. These crises are compromising the diet and health of up to 80% of the population in most developing countries and threaten the development of almost an entire generation of children ( approximately 250 million), because the period from conception until 24 mo of age irreversibly shapes people's health and intellectual ability. High food prices reduce diversity and nutritional quality of the diet and for many also reduce food quantity...

2009

Alderman, Harold, Biram Ndiaye, Sebastian Linnemayr, Abdoulaye Kane, Claudia Rokx, Hadidiatou Dieng, and Menno Sibanda. (2009). "Effectiveness of a Community-based Intervention to Improve Nutrition in Young Children in Senegal: A Difference in Difference Analysis." Public Health Nutrition 12(5): 667–73.
There are few studies of community growth promotion as a means of addressing malnutrition that are based on longitudinal analysis of large-scale programmes with adequate controls to construct a counterfactual. The current study uses a difference in difference comparison of cohorts to assess the impact on the proportion of underweight children who lived in villages receiving services provided by the Senegal Nutrition Enhancement Project between 2004 and 2006. The project, designed to extend nutrition and growth promotion intervention into rural areas through non-governmental organisation service providers, significantly lowered the risk of a child having a weight more than 2 sd below international norms...

Alderman, Harold, and Sebastian Linnemayr. (2009). "Anemia In Low Income Countries Is Unlikely To Be Addressed by Economic Development Without Additional Programs." Food and Nutrition Bulletin 30(3): 265–70.
Although governments may decline to invest in iron fortification or supplementation influenced by the view that income growth will address the problem, the data do not support this view. Looking at the rates of anemia among children and adult women across 40 Demographic and Health Surveys from 32 countries, this study found that although anemia rates do decrease as income increases, the decrease is modest. Indeed, overall anemia rates decline roughly a quarter as fast as income increases and at only half the speed at which rates of underweight decline...

Alderman, Harold, Hans Hoogeveen, and Mariacristina Rossi. (2009)."Preschool Nutrition and Subsequent Schooling Attainment: Longitudinal Evidence from Tanzania." Economic Development and Cultural Change 57(2): 239–60.
This study analyzes how childhood health determines future academic performance in the Kagera region in Tanzania. Academic outcomes considered are years of education and delay in enrollment, and the measure of childhood health is height (relative to the median). The repercussions of malnutrition in childhood on subsequent learning and school performance are analyzed by using a unique longitudinal data set...

Barnhardt, Sharon, Dean Karlan, and Stuti Khemani. (2009). "Participation in a School Incentive Programme in India." Journal of Development Studies 45(3): 369–90.
Education policy has recently focused on improving accountability and incentives of public providers for actual learning outcomes, often with school-based reward programmes for high performers. The Learning Guarantee Programme in Karnataka, India, is prominent among such efforts, providing cash transfers to government schools that achieve learning at specified high levels. This study examines whether schools that self-selected into the incentive programme are different than those that did not. The answer has important implications for how to evaluate the impact of such a programme...

Chun, Heeran, and Monica Das Gupta. (2009). "Gender Discrimination in Sex Selective Abortions and Its Transition in South Korea." Women’s Studies International Forum 32(2): 89–97.
Despite increased economic growth and social development, gender relations in South Korea have not progressed much. This may be due to an existing Confucian dogma in Korean society, which accords women a subordinate status. One insidious example of this gender discrimination is female selective abortion and the resulting imbalanced sex ratio...

D’adda, Giovanna, Markus Goldstein, Joshua Zivin, Mabel Nangami, and Harsha Thirumurthy. (2009). "AERC-Cornell Symposium on ‘Risk, Knowledge and Health in Africa’: ARV Treatment and Time Allocation to Household Tasks: Evidence from Kenya." African Development Review 21(1): 180–208.
Using longitudinal survey data collected over a period of two years, this paper examines the impact of antiretroviral (ARV) treatment on the time allocated to various household tasks by treated HIV-positive patients and their household members. We study outcomes such as time devoted to housework, firewood and water collection, as well as care-giving and care-seeking. As treatment improves the health and productivity of patients, we find that female patients in particular are able to increase the amount of time they devote to water and firewood collection...

Buvinic Mayra, Monica Das Gupta, and Ursula Casabonne. (2009). "Gender, Poverty, and Demography: An Overview." World Bank Economic Review 23(3): 347–69.
Much has been written on gender inequality and how it affects fertility and mortality outcomes as well as economic outcomes. What is not well understood is the role of gender inequality, embedded in the behavior of the family, the market, and society, in mediating the impact of demographic processes on economic outcomes. This article reviews the empirical evidence on the possible economic impacts of gender inequalities that work by exacerbating demographic stresses associated with different demographic scenarios and reducing the prospects of gains when demographic conditions improve...

Das Gupta, Monica, Woojin Chung, and Li Shuzhuo. (2009). "Evidence for an Incipient Decline in Numbers of Missing Girls in China and India." Population and Development Review 35(2): 401–16.
The apparently inexorable rise in the proportion of "missing girls" in much of East and South Asia has attracted much attention among researchers and policymakers. An encouraging trend was suggested by the case of South Korea, where child sex ratios (males to females under age 5) were the highest in Asia but peaked in the mid-1990s and normalized thereafter. Using census data, we examine whether similar trends have begun to manifest themselves in the two most populous countries of this region, China and India...

Das Gupta, M. and L. Gostin (2009). "Donors' roles in building of global public goods in health." Lancet 373(9672): 1395-1397.
The dissonance between the public health services provided in developed countries compared with those promoted by donors in developing countries is curious and costly. Population-wide services are a core component of publicly funded health services in developed countries, and are underpinned by a framework of public health regulations to reduce exposure to communicable diseases.1 In developing countries, donors and international aid agencies have prioritised clinical services above population-wide services...

Das, Jishnu, Quy-Toan Do, Jed Friedman, and David McKenzie. (2009). "Mental Health Patterns and Consequences: Results from Survey Data in Five Developing Countries." World Bank Economic Review 23(1): 31–55.
The social and economic consequences of poor mental health in the developing world are presumed to be significant, yet remain underresearched. This study uses data from nationally representative surveys in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Indonesia, and Mexico and from special surveys in India and Tonga to show similar patterns of association between mental health and socioeconomic characteristics. Individuals who are older, female, widowed, and report poor physical health are more likely to report worse mental health...

de Walque, Damien. (2009). "Does Education Affect HIV Status? Evidence from five African Countries." World Bank Economic Review 23(2): 209–33.
Data from the first five Demographic and Health Surveys to include HIV testing for a representative sample of the adult population are used to analyze the socioeconomic correlates of HIV infection and associated sexual behavior. Emerging from a wealth of country relevant results, some important findings can be generalized. First, successive marriages are a significant risk factor...

de Walque, Damien. (2009). "Parental Education and Children’s Schooling Outcomes: Evidence from Recomposed Families in Rwanda." Economic Development and Cultural Change 57(4): 723–46.
In this article, I investigate how educational outcomes of orphans are affected by the education of the family members in their new family. The study uses household survey data from Rwanda that contain a large proportion of children living in households without their biological parents. The data also allow controlling for the educational attainment of the absent biological parents and the type of relationship that links the children to their adoptive families...

Ferreira, Francisco H. G., and Norbert Schady. (2009). "Aggregate Economic Shocks, Child Schooling and Child Health." World Bank Research Observer 24(2): 147–81.
Do aggregate income shocks, such as those caused by macroeconomic crises or droughts, reduce child human capital? The answer to this question has important implications for public policy. If shocks reduce investments in children, they may have a long-lasting impact on poverty and its intergenerational transmission...

Filmer, D., J. Friedman, et al. (2009). "Development, Modernization, and Childbearing: The Role of Family Sex Composition." World Bank Economic Review 23(3): 371-398.
Does the sex composition of existing children in a family affect fertility behavior? An unusually large data set, covering 64 countries and some 5 million births, is used to show that fertility behavior responds to the presence—or absence—of sons in many regions of the developing world. The response to the absence of sons is particularly large in Central Asia and South Asia...

Heckelman, Jac, and Stephen Knack. (2009). "Aid, Economic Freedom and Growth." Contemporary Economic Policy 27(1): 46–53.
Foreign aid has often been intended by donors to entice recipient nations into policy and institutional reforms favorable to private sector economic development. In this study, we investigate the relationship between aid and changes to economic freedom in recipient nations over the 1990-2000 decade. The evidence is mixed...

Keefer, Philip, and Stuti Khemani. (2009). "When do Legislators Pass on Pork? The Role of Political Parties in Determining Legislator Effort." American Political Science Review 103(1): 99–112.
A central challenge in political economy is to identify the conditions under which legislators seek to "bring home the pork" to constituents. We conduct the first systematic analysis of one determinant of constituency service, voter attachment to political parties, holding constant electoral and political institutions. Our analysis takes advantage of data from a unique type of public spending program that is proliferating across developing countries, the constituency development fund (CDF), which offers more precise measures of legislator effort than are common in the literature...

King, Elizabeth M., and Jere Behrman. (2009). "Symposium on Evaluation: Timing and Duration of Exposure in Evaluations of Social Programs." World Bank Research Observer 24(1): 55–82.
Impact evaluations aim to measure the outcomes that can be attributed to a specific policy or intervention. While there have been excellent reviews of the different methods for estimating impact, insufficient attention has been paid to questions related to timing: How long after a program has begun should it be evaluated? For how long should treatment groups be exposed to a program before they benefit from it?...

Knack, Stephen. (2009). "Sovereign Rents and Quality of Tax Policy and Administration."  Journal of Comparative Economics 37(3): 359–71.
Knack, Stephen-Sovereign rents and quality of tax policy and administration Windfall revenues from foreign aid or natural resource exports can weaken governments' incentives to design or maintain efficient tax systems. Cross-country data for developing countries provide evidence for this hypothesis, using a World Bank indicator on "efficiency of revenue mobilization." Aid's negative effects on quality of tax systems are robust to correcting for potential reverse causality, to changes in the sample, and to alternative estimation methods...

van de Walle, Dominique. (2009). "Impact Evaluation of Rural Road Projects." Journal of Development Effectiveness 1(1): 15–36.
Very few of the (many) aid-financed rural road projects in developing countries have been the subject of rigorous impact evaluations. Assessing the welfare impacts of rural roads poses a number of problems, with implications for data collection and evaluation methods. This paper surveys the problems and discusses some practical implementation issues related specifically to conducting an impact evaluation of a rural roads project that is assigned to some geographic areas but not to others... 

Wagstaff, Adam, Winnie Yip, Magnus Lindelow, and William Hsiao. (2009). "China’s Health System and Its Reform: A Review of Recent Studies." Health Economics 18(2): 7–23.
This paper provides a survey of the recent empirical research on China's 'old' health system (i.e. prior to the spate of reforms beginning in 2003). It argues that this research has enhanced Our understanding of the system prior to 2003, in some cases reinforcing conclusions (e.g. the demand-inducement associated with perverse incentives) while in other cases suggesting a slightly less clear storyline (e.g. the link between insurance and out-of-pocket spending). It also concludes that the research to date points to the importance of careful evaluation of the Current reforms, and its potential to modify policies as the rollout proceeds...

Wagstaff, Adam. (2009). "Reranking and Pro-Poor Growth: Decompositions for China and Vietnam." Journal of Development Studies 45(9): 1403–25.
Reranking in the move from one income distribution to another makes it impossible to infer from changes in Lorenz and generalised Lorenz curves how income growth among those toward the bottom of the initial income distribution compares to that among those toward the top, and whether there has been income growth among those who were initially poor. Decompositions allowing for reranking indicate that economic growth in China and Vietnam has been better for households who were initially poor than changes in the Lorenz and generalised Lorenz curve and poverty growth curve would suggest...

Wagstaff, Adam. (2009). "Correcting the Concentration Index: A Comment." Journal of Health Economics 28(2): 516–20.
In a recent article in this journal, Erreygers [Erreygers, G., 2008. Correcting the concentration index, Journal of Health Economics] has proposed a new measure of income-related inequality to overcome three shortcomings of the concentration index (CI). I think Erreygers is absolutely right to probe on these issues, and si welcome his generalization of my normalization which was specific to the case of a binary health indicator. However, in have misgivings about his paper...

Wagstaff, Adam, Magnus Lindelow, G. Jun, X. Ling, and Q. Juncheng. (2009). "Extending Health Insurance to the Rural Population : An Impact Evaluation of China’s New Cooperative Medical Scheme." Journal of Health Economics 28(1): 1–19.
In 2003, China launched a heavily Subsidized voluntary health insurance program for rural residents. We combine differences-in-differences with matching methods to obtain impact estimates, using data collected from program administrators, health facilities and households. The scheme has increased outpatient and inpatient utilization, and has reduced the cost of deliveries...

Wagstaff, Adam, and Rodrigo Moreno-Serra. (2009). "Europe and Central Asia’s Great Post-communist Social Health Insurance Experiment: Impacts on Health Sector Outcomes." Journal of Health Economics 28(2): 322–40.
The post-Communist transition to social health insurance in many of the Central and Eastern European and Central Asian countries provides a unique opportunity too try to answer some of the unresolved issues in the debate over the relative merits of social health insurance and tax-financed health systems. This paper employs regression-based generalizations of the difference-in-differences method on panel data from 28 countries for the period 1990-2004. We find that, controlling for any concurrent provider payment reforms, adoption of social health insurance increased national health spending and hospital activity rates, but did not lead to better health outcomes...

Gauthier, Bernard, and Waly Wane. (2009). "Leakage of Public Resources in the Health Sector: An Empirical Investigation of Chad." Journal of African Economics 18(1): 52–83.
In the public sector in developing countries, leakage of public resources could prove detrimental to users and affect the well-being of the population. This paper empirically examines the importance of leakage of government resources in the health sector in Chad, and its effects on the prices of drugs. The analysis uses data collected in Chad as part of a Health Facilities Survey organised by the World Bank in 2004...

Yip, Winnie, Adam Wagstaff, and William Hsiao. (2009). "Economic Analysis of China’s Health Care System: Turning a New Page." Health Economics 18(S2): S3–S6.
After years of intense discussion, deliberation and debate, in April, 2009 China finally unveiled its health care reform plan (Anonymous, 2009; Chen, 2009). President Hu clearly stated that the goal of the reform is to ensure that every citizen has equal access to affordable basic health care by 2012. The recently announced policy explicitly states the government’s role in the health care sector for purposes of equity and the provision of public goods, while encouraging the exploration of purchasing, competition and other market mechanisms to improve quality and efficiency...

Zivin, Joshua, Harsha Thirumurthy, and Markus Goldstein. (2009). "AIDS Treatment and Intrahousehold Resource Allocation: Children’s Nutrition and Schooling in Kenya." Journal of Public Economics 93(7): 1008–15.
The provision of antiretroviral medications is a central component of the response to HIV/AIDS and consumes substantial public resources from around the world, but little is known about this intervention's impact on the welfare of children in treated persons' households. Using longitudinal survey data from Kenya, we examine the relationship between the provision of treatment to adults and the schooling and nutrition outcomes of children in their households. Weekly hours of school attendance increase by over 20% within 6 months after treatment is initiated for the adult patient...

2008

Andrabi, T., J. Das, et al. (2008). "A dime a day: The possibilities and limits of private schooling in Pakistan." Comparative Education Review 52(3): 329-355.
Pakistan is severely offtrack in its progress toward the Millennium Development Goals relating to education for all. Its educational performance is poor, both in absolute terms and relative to the average income of the country. With an adult literacy rate of 44 percent (compared to 54 percent for the South Asian average) and net enrollments (for 2001–2) of 51 percent (as compared to 83 percent for India, 90 percent for Sri Lanka, and 70 percent for Nepal), Pakistan struggles to meet the educational needs of its 132 million people...

Dang, Hai-Anh H., and F. Halsey Rogers. 2008. "The Growing Phenomenon of Private Tutoring: Does It Deepen Human Capital, Widen Inequalities, or Waste Resources?" World Bank Research Observer 23(2): 161–200.
Does private tutoring increase parental choice and improve student achievement, or does it exacerbate social inequalities and impose heavy costs on households, possibly without improving student outcomes? Private tutoring is now a major component of the education sector in many developing countries, yet education policy too seldom acknowledges or makes use of it. This survey of the literature examines the extent of private tutoring, identifies the factors that explain its growth, and analyzes its cost-effectiveness in improving student academic performance...

Das, Jishnu, Quy-Toan Do, Jed Friedman and Kinnon Scott. 2008. "Revisiting the relationship between mental health and poverty in developing countries: a response to Corrigall" Social Science & Medicine 66(9): 2064–66.
In their commentary ‘‘Poverty and mental illness: fact or fiction? A commentary on Das, Do, Friedman, McKenzie & Scott (65:3, 2007, 467e480),’’ Corrigall, Lund, Patel, Plagerson, and Funk (2008) raise several questions about the validity of our study (Das, Do, Friedman, McKenzie, & Scott, 2007) and the interpretation of our results, in particular the lack of a substantial association between consumption poverty and mental health. This response examines why associations between poverty and mental health are of interest and then addresses Corrigall et al concerns...

Das, Jishnu. 2008. "Low Income, Social Growth and Good Health: A History of Twelve Countries." New England Journal of Medicine 358(26): 2851–51.
Are increases in the incomes of countries necessary or sufficient for the good health of their people? In this book, James Riley argues that they are not. Woven into the case studies of 12 low-income countries that achieved high life expectancies are two interrelated themes...

Das, Jishnu, Quy-Toan Do, Jed Friedman, and David McKenzie. 2008. "The Quality of Medical Advice in Low-Income Countries." Journal of Economic Perspectives 22(2): 93-114.
In 1978, an International Conference on Primary Health Care was held at Alma Ata in what was then the USSR and is now Kazakhstan. The resulting Alma Ata Declaration called “for urgent action by all governments, all health and development workers, and the world community to protect and promote the health of all the people of the world” (World Health Organization, 1978). While “action” was understood to mean a wide variety of interventions including safe water, sanitation, nutrition, and pest control, primary health care was also emphasized, and it eventually captured a larger proportion of health budgets than purely preventive services...

Das Gupta, Monica. 2008. "Can Biological Factors like Hepatitis Explain the Bulk of Gender Imbalance in China? A Review of the Evidence." World Bank Research Observer 23(2): 201–17.
A recent study challenges the assumption that the large deficit of girls in East and South Asia reflects the preference for sons, suggesting that much of the deficit--as much as 75 percent in China--is attributable to hepatitis B (HBV). The claim is inconsistent with the results of a study based on a large medical data set from Taiwan (China), which indicates that HBV infection raises a woman's probability of having a son by only 0.25 percent. In addition, demographic data from China show that the only group of women who have elevated probabilities of bearing sons are those who have already borne daughters...

de Walque, Damien. 2008. "Do Unsafe Tetanus Toxoid Injections Play a Significant Role in the Transmission of HIV/AIDS? Evidence from Seven African Countries." Sexually Transmitted Infections (STI) 84: 122–25.
OBJECTIVES: Although sexual transmission is generally considered to be the main factor driving the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa, recent studies have claimed that iatrogenic transmission should be considered as an important source of HIV infection. In particular, receipt of tetanus toxoid injections during pregnancy has been reported to be associated with HIV infection in Kenya. The objective of this paper is to assess the robustness of this association among women in nationally representative HIV surveys in seven African countries...

de Walque, Damien. 2008. "Review of the Demography of Armed Conflict, 2006, edited by Helge Brunborg, Ewa Tabeau and Henrik Urdal." Population Studies 62(1): 122–23.
This volume brings together 16 articles previously published in the Journal of Peace Research or the European Journal of Population. Most of those articles had been presented at a seminar entitled ‘Demography of Conflict and Violence’ organized under the auspices of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population (IUSSP) in Oslo in 2003...

Eggleston, Karen, Li Ling, Meng Qingyue, Magnus Lindelow, and Adam Wagstaff. 2008. "Health Service Delivery in China: A Literature Review." Health Economics 17(2): 149–65.
We report the results of a review of the Chinese- and English-language literatures on service delivery in China, asking how well China's health-care providers perform and what determines their performance. Although data and methodological limitations suggest caution in drawing conclusions, a critical reading of the available evidence suggests that current health service delivery in China leaves room for improvement, in terms of quality, responsiveness to patients, efficiency, cost escalation, and equity. The literature suggests that these problems will not be solved by simply shifting ownership to the private sector or by simply encouraging providers - public and private - to compete with one another for individual patients...

Filmer, Deon P. 2008. "Disability, Poverty, and Schooling in Developing Countries: Results from 14 Household Surveys." World Bank Economic Review 22(1): 141–63.
Analysis of 14 household surveys from 13 developing countries suggests that 1-2 percent of the population have disabilities. Adults with disabilities typically live in poorer than average households: disability is associated with about a 10 percentage point increase in the probability of falling in the two poorest quintiles. Much of the association appears to reflect lower educational attainment among adults with disabilities...

Filmer, Deon P., and Norbert Schady. 2008. "Getting Girls into School: Evidence from a Scholarship Program in Cambodia." Economic Development and Cultural Change 56(3): 581–617.
Increasing the schooling attainment of girls is a challenge in much of the developing world. In this study we evaluate the impact of a program that gives scholarships to girls making the transition between the last year of primary school and the first year of secondary school in Cambodia. We show that the scholarship program increased the enrollment and attendance of recipients at program schools by about 30 percentage points...

Goldstein, Markus, and Christopher Udry. 2008. "The Profits of Power: Land Rights and Agricultural Investment in Ghana." Journal of Political Economy 116(6): 981–1022.
We examine the impact of ambiguous and contested land rights on investment and productivity in agriculture in Akwapim, Ghana. We show that individuals who hold powerful positions in a local political hierarchy have more secure tenure rights and that as a consequence they invest more in land fertility and have substantially higher output. The intensity of investments on different plots cultivated by a given individual corresponds to that individual's security of tenure over those specific plots and, in turn, to the individual's position in the political hierarchy relevant to those specific plots...

Heckelman, Jac, and Stephen Knack. 2008. "Foreign Aid and Market-Liberalizing Policy Reform." Economica 75(299): 524–48.
Market-oriented economic policies have been strongly linked to faster rates of economic growth. Foreign aid is often provided in part to encourage market-oriented reforms. We analyse the impact of aid on market-liberalizing policy reform, correcting for its potential endogeneity...

Linnemayr, Sebastian, Harold H. Alderman, and Abdoulaye Kane. 2008. "Determinants of Malnutrition in Senegal: Individual, Household, Community Variables, and Their Interaction." Economics and Human Biology 6(2): 252–63.
The relationship between poverty and nutrition is a two-sided one: on the one hand, economic growth (which is generally associated with an eradication of poverty) leads to reduced malnutrition. On the other hand, nutrition is one of the key ingredients for human capital formation, which in turn represents one of the fundamental factors of growth. There are numerous studies that show the correlates of malnutrition using both household- and community-level variables...

Ravallion, Martin, and Dominique van de Walle. 2008. "Land and Poverty in Reforming East Asia." Finance and Development 45(3): 38–41.
Both China and Vietnam have made enormous progress in the fight against poverty, and the evidence suggests that rural economic growth has played a large role in this success. Using each country's own definition of poverty, with a constant real poverty line over time, China's poverty rate fell from more than 50 percent in 1981 to about 20 percent in 1991 and 5 percent in 2005. In Vietnam, poverty fell from almost 60 percent to 20 percent during 1993-2004...

Ravallion, Martin, and Dominique van de Walle. 2008. "Does Rising Landlessness Signal Success or Failure for Vietnam’s Agrarian Transition?" Journal of Development Economics 87(2): 191–209.
In the wake of reforms to establish a free market in land-use rights, Vietnam experienced a pronounced rise in rural landlessness. To some observers this is a harmless by-product of a more efficient economy, while to others it signals the return of the pre-socialist class structure, with the rural landless at the bottom of the economic ladder. We study the issue empirically using four household surveys spanning 1993-2004...

Schady, Norbert, and M. Caridad Araujo. 2008. "Cash Transfers, Conditions, and School Enrollment in Ecuador." Economía 8(2): 43–70.
Investments in human capital in childhood are generally believed to be critical for adult well-being. Children who have higher educational attainment are more productive as adults, earn higher wages, and have better health status than children with less education. In country after country, governments have sought to devise effective policies to increase school enrollment...

Schady, N. and J. Rosero (2008). "Are cash transfers made to women spent like other sources of income?" Economics Letters 101(3): 246-248.
We use a randomized design to analyze the effects of unconditional cash transfers to women on the food Engel curve. After the intervention, households assigned to the “treatment” group had significantly higher food shares than those assigned to the “control” group...

Thirumurthy, Harsha, Joshua Zivin, and Markus Goldstein. 2008. "The Economic Impact of AIDS Treatment: Labor Supply in Western Kenya." The Journal of Human Resources 43(3): 511–52.
Using longitudinal survey data collected in collaboration with a treatment program, this paper estimates the economic impacts of antiretroviral treatment. The responses in two outcomes are studied: (1) labor supply of treated adult AIDS patients; and (2) labor supply of individuals in patients' households. Within six months after treatment initiation, there is a 20 percent increase in the likelihood of the patient participating in the labor force and a 35 percent increase in weekly hours worked...

Wagstaff, Adam, and Magnus Lindelow. 2008. "Can Insurance Increase Financial Risk? The Curious Case of Health Insurance in China." Journal of Health Economics 27(4): 990–1005.
We analyze the effect of insurance on the probability of an individual incurring 'high' annual health expenses using data from three household surveys. All come from China, a country where providers are paid fee-for-service according to a schedule that encourages the overprovision of high-tech care and who are only lightly regulated. We define annual spending as 'high' if it exceeds a threshold of local average income and as 'catastrophic' if it exceeds a threshold of the household's own per capita income...