1,721,001 research outputs found
Does community-based health insurance affect lifestyle and timing of treatment seeking behavior?:Evidence from Ethiopia
Full text linkAbstract Objectives This paper aims to investigate the effects of enrollment in the Ethiopian community-based health insurance (CBHI) scheme on household preventive care activities and the timing of treatment-seeking behavior for illness symptoms. There is growing concern about the financial sustainability of CBHI schemes in developing countries. However, few empirical studies have identified potential contributors, including ex-ante and ex-post moral hazards. Methods We implement a household fixed-effect panel data regression model, drawing on three rounds of household survey data collected face to face in districts where CBHI scheme is operational and in districts where it is not operational in Ethiopia. Results The findings show that enrolment in CBHI does not significantly influence household behaviour regarding preventive care activities such as water treatment before drinking and handwashing before meals. However, CBHI significantly increases delay in treatment-seeking behaviour for diseases symptoms. Particularly, on average, we estimate about 4‒6 h delay for malaria symptoms, a little above 4 h for tetanus, and 10‒11 h for tuberculosis among the insured households. Conclusions While there is evidence that CBHI improve the utilization of outpatient or primary care services, our study suggests that insured members may wait longer before visiting health facilities. This delay could be partly due to moral hazard problems, as insured households, particularly those from rural areas, may consider the opportunity costs associated with visiting health facilities for minor symptoms. Overall, it is essential to identify the primary causes of delays in seeking medical services and implement appropriate interventions to encourage insured individuals to seek early medical attention
The Sustainable Livelihoods Approach as an impact assessment tool for development interventions in rural Tigray, Ethiopia : opportunities & challenges
Full text linkMeasuring the impact and sustainability of development programmes requires the development of appropriate assessment tools. This paper examines the Sustainable Livelihoods Approach's (SLA) potential to be transformed to and called in as a practical instrument to evaluate the impact of development interventions in rural Tigray (Northern Ethiopia).
Fieldwork has been carried out in communities in woreda Dogua Tembien using participant observation and open interviews as methods.
Next to more general challenges of defining, measuring and comparing livelihood assets, context specific factors complicate the operationalisation of the SLA as an impact assessment tool in the area. The SLA distinguishes between livelihood assets on the one hand and transforming structures and processes on the other. The latter lend meaning and value to the former. This conceptual distinction is worthy as it makes the two-way interaction between both categories explicit and escapes from reducing institutions, organisations, policies and legislation to context or background. However, in practice the boundaries are fuzzy and not easy to interpret. The example of religion as a cross-cutting organizing principle illustrates this assumption. Moreover the distinction complicates the operationalisation of the SLA as it implies the meaning and value of capitals to be volatile and depending on the prevailing social, institutional and organisational environment. This is exemplified with the big transforming power of policy shifts in the area.
For the SLA to serve as an impact assessment tool, it requires a culture- and policy-sensitive analysis of farmers' asset base. Only a sound understanding of the interactions between livelihood assets and transforming structures and processes can lead to a locally contextualised, meaningful and workable impact assessment tool that measures asset levels using indicators that reflect farmers' own criteria to judge development interventions
The Sustainable Livelihoods Approach as an impact assessment tool for development interventions in rural Tigray, Ethiopia: opportunities & challenges
Full text linkMeasuring the impact and sustainability of development programmes requires the development of appropriate assessment tools. This paper examines the Sustainable Livelihoods Approach's (SLA) potential to be transformed to and called in as a practical instrument to evaluate the impact of development interventions in rural Tigray (Northern Ethiopia).
Fieldwork has been carried out in communities in woreda Dogua Tembien using participant observation and open interviews as methods.
Next to more general challenges of defining, measuring and comparing livelihood assets, context specific factors complicate the operationalisation of the SLA as an impact assessment tool in the area. The SLA distinguishes between livelihood assets on the one hand and transforming structures and processes on the other. The latter lend meaning and value to the former. This conceptual distinction is worthy as it makes the two-way interaction between both categories explicit and escapes from reducing institutions, organisations, policies and legislation to context or background. However, in practice the boundaries are fuzzy and not easy to interpret. The example of religion as a cross-cutting organizing principle illustrates this assumption. Moreover the distinction complicates the operationalisation of the SLA as it implies the meaning and value of capitals to be volatile and depending on the prevailing social, institutional and organisational environment. This is exemplified with the big transforming power of policy shifts in the area.
For the SLA to serve as an impact assessment tool, it requires a culture- and policy-sensitive analysis of farmers' asset base. Only a sound understanding of the interactions between livelihood assets and transforming structures and processes can lead to a locally contextualised, meaningful and workable impact assessment tool that measures asset levels using indicators that reflect farmers' own criteria to judge development interventionssponsorship: VLIRstatus: Publishe
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Conceptualising Famine in Ethiopia
Full text linkThis paper attempts to explain the nature of recurrent famine, not just as a result of a series of adventitious effects, but more importantly as the unintended outcome of an exclusionary growth model. This adventitious effects matter a great deal, but their impact can only be understood in the light of the inherent weakness of the growth model, which impoverished the peasantry and hence generated their vulnerability to famine
The Macroeconomics of Foreign Aid to Ethiopia: Internal Balance and Fiscal Response-An Alternate Framework
Full text linkForeign aid recipient fiscal response in developing countries is studied using utility/welfare maximization principle. The underlying assumption of this function (utility/welfare can be maximized by narrowing the deviations of the actual values from their desired values subject to the constraints of finance) doesn’t capture the interplay between project aid inflows and the adjustment process of the government budget. This paper proposes an alternative framework in conceptualizing the recipients fiscal response. This was possible due to the special feature of this paper that aid is disassociated from foreign capital inflow and also identified by its usage which is not the case in other similar studies. This makes one of the strong point and hence the advantage of this paper. Ethiopia in the pre-EPRDF regimes received project aid. The alternative conceptual framework is that project aid is an investment support which pays only for foreign exchange cost component of the investment program. This kind of aid requires the recipient government to generate local resource in order to finance the local currency component of the investment cost and recurrent costs to keep the created capacity running. In this context the change in investment will be greater than the change in project aid inflow. Hence, domestic savings will increase and government tries to improve both tax collection effort and rate and in the context of burgeoned public sector, the government will also try to raise its non-tax revenue through public enterprises surplus transfer (this has never been an issue of the fiscal response literature) to finance the difference. The results were entirely contrary to the conventional claims. Project aid has no ‘displacement effect’. Government was responding positively to project aid by improving both tax collection effort and tax rates and by increasing its non-tax revenue. In the absence of real savings, the government, however, finances the local currency component of the investment cost by domestic bank borrowing: transferring private resources and printing money. It is argued that transferring of resources from private budget surplus to the public sector was carried out through distorted preferential domestic credit policies by crowding-out private investment and depressing personal consumption. Distorted domestic credit policies (rationing with preferential treatment to public sector) was, therefore, unintended outcome the fiscal adjustment to the aid inflow, generating the local fund for local currency costs of the aid-financed public investment in excess of real public savings
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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