39 research outputs found
Bread and Social Justice : Measurement of Social Welfare and Inequality Using Anthropometrics
No full textThis work was supported by the French National Research Agency Grant ANR-17-EURE-0020, and by the Excellence Initiative of Aix-Marseille University - A*MIDEX. The authors would like to thank two anonymous reviewers, Sameera Awawda and Gaston Yalonetzky for constructive comments and suggestions. The paper was written in part while Abul Naga was a visitor at AixMarseille Université. The author thanks the IMÉRA Institute of Advanced Studies and the AixMarseille School of Economics for their kind hospitality
Feuille de route pour atteindre la couverture sanitaire universelle dans les pays en développement : l'apport des micro-simulations dans les modèles dynamiques d'équilibre général calculable
No full textLa couverture sanitaire universelle (CSU) est considérée comme un pilier des objectifs de développement durable 2015-2030. Cette thèse se propose d’éclairer le débat sur la soutenabilité financière de la CSU et son impact sur des variables micro- et macro-économiques à l’aide d’un modèle dynamique d’équilibre général calculable, associé à des techniques de microsimulation. Le premier chapitre présente le modèle théorique calibré pour refléter les principales caractéristiques des pays en développement. Les résultats montrent, pour deux modalités du financement de la CSU, comment peut varier le degré de protection financière contre les risques maladies. Dans le deuxième chapitre, nous adaptons le modèle général au contexte particulier de la Palestine pour analyser l’effet de la mise en œuvre de la CSU sur le budget du gouvernent et le bien-être de la population. Les résultats démontrent qu’une expansion en parallèle de la CSU sur la population et les services de soins peut améliorer le bien-être des ménages. Néanmoins, dans des conditions d'espace budgétaire limité, cette expansion s’avère insoutenable à long-terme, appelant ainsi à un ajustement de la politique fiscale. Le troisième chapitre se consacre à l’évaluation des inégalités intergénérationnelles induites par le choix des politiques visant à assurer la pérennité de la CSU. Nous proposons une mesure permettant d’évaluer les transferts intergénérationnels liés au fardeau de la CSU. Les résultats montrent que, dans des conditions d'espace budgétaire limité, le choix des politiques peut impliquer un arbitrage entre la soutenabilité financière de la CSU et différents degrés d’inégalités intergénérationnelles.Universal Health Coverage (UHC) has received during the last decade a revived interest by policy-makers, international organizations and researchers worldwide. There has been hitherto no theoretical-empirical work that can enable to assess the feasibility of UHC and its potential effects at both micro- and macro-economic levels. This thesis presents an operationalizing theoretical framework that is capable of addressing the above issues using dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model and microsimulation technique. The first chapter presents the DSGE model that is calibrated to capture the salient features of an archetype developing economy. Results illustrate how the degree of financial-risk protection can vary with the financing-mix used to implement the UHC reform. The second chapter assesses the macro-fiscal conduciveness of UHC reforms and its impact on welfare and public finance in the particular context of Palestine. Results show that while UHC can enhance welfare, a parallel expansion of the breadth and width of coverage may not be feasible unless a policy adjustment is undertaken. The third chapter examines the potential impact of UHC reforms on intergenerational inequalities in view of fiscal sustainability. The question of who bears the burden of the UHC is addressed using an overlapping generation model, while a convenient measure to assess the social impact of UHC-financing strategies is proposed. Results show that under conditions of limited fiscal space, the choice between deferred-debt and current UHC-financing implies a trade-off between fiscal sustainability against intergenerational inequality, with which the policy-maker will have to confront
Does women’s higher education reduce wage inequality? Evidence from Palestine using repeated cross-sectional data
No full textAbstract Despite the increase of the share of highly-educated women, gender wage gap remains an ongoing issue in developing countries. The increase in women’s education would provide them with more job opportunities resulting in higher employment rate amongst women and, thus, lower gender pay gap. In Palestine, the share of women with high education is 62% while their labor force participation rate is only 18%. This paper examines the effects of gender higher education on wage inequality in the Palestinian context. The study applied the Mincer equation to study the determinants of wage, while the decomposed Gini coefficient is used to measure the contribution of education and other factors to overall wage inequality. The study used data from the labor force survey (LFS) which is conducted by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) covering the period from 2010 to 2020. Results show that those with higher education have relatively higher wages as compared to those with only high education or with school education. Results also show that gender wage inequality has increased during the study period (2010–2020), but the contribution of both gender and education differences to the overall wage inequality has decreased. In general, the gender pay gap remains a crucial issue in the Palestinian context with a persisting decreasing pay gap over time across all education levels. Policymakers shall orient efforts towards investing in women’s education, thus increasing their empowerment in the labor market, which in turn would improve the level of development and economic growth in the country
Attainment of universal health coverage in the occupied Palestinian territory assessed by a general equilibrium approach: is informality an irreversible hurdle for universality?
No full textCAT: General & Internal MedicineBackground: Achieving universal health coverage (UHC) has recently received attention in response to calls from international organisations to expand health coverage to hard-to-reach segments of the population (eg, informal workers, and unemployed and poor people). Despite the strong commitment to achieving UHC, its implementation continues to spark vigorous debate among policy makers, scholars, and the international health community. Much of the recent debate has focused on the macro-fiscal challenges that many developing countries face in implementing and sustaining UHC-oriented reforms, and there has also been debate in relation to challenges of the micro-behavioural sphere (at the level of the individual). Some of these challenges pertain to the structure of the labour market in developing countries, which is characterised by the large size of non-contributory segments of the population, mainly informal workers and unemployed individuals. This raises the important policy questions of the feasibility of expanding health coverage to the informal sector and the unemployed on a contributory basis.Methods: We assessed the feasibility of UHC using a dynamic general equilibrium approach while accounting for heterogeneity across households in terms of their employment and socioeconomic status. The model was calibrated using the Palestinian Expenditures and Consumption Survey (PECS, 2011), and the Social Accounting Matrix (SAM, 2011). We assessed alternative health insurance designs proposed to target the informal workers. Fiscal sustainability of the reforms was examined using the debt-to-GDP ratio and the microeconomic impact was assessed using the concept of consumption equivalent variation (CEV), defined as the amount of additional consumption a household would give up to move from the pre-insurance to the post-insurance level of welfare. A positive CEV value indicates that individuals are willing to pay for the health insurance. The higher the CEV value, the higher the gains of health insurance.Findings: A simultaneous expansion of UHC coverage of the population and health-care costs would enhance welfare for all households. However, such an expansion would reduce government expenditure that is allocated to other sectors; for example, it was estimated that the reduction would have been approximately 10% in 2020. To finance this UHC-driven debt, we examined the impact of a tax-financed UHC-oriented reform and a low-premium, low-coverage government-sponsored health insurance that targets informal workers. Although both policies would generate additional revenues to serve the UHC debt, government-sponsored health insurance targeting informal workers seems to be more feasible in terms of its impact on household welfare. That is, the informal workers would be better off under the government-sponsored health insurance scheme.Interpretation: In the absence of precise information on the ability to pay of informal workers, which in some cases might be comparable to that of formal workers, it is reasonable for the government to charge better-off informal workers rather than naively exempting them. The findings corroborate previous evidence suggesting that informal workers are willing to join health insurance schemes that charge them lower premiums for a slightly less generous benefit package than the health insurance schemes of formal workers. This health insurance might be deemed equitable in terms of the degree of financial protection that informal workers can obtain compared with the scenario in which they are left to bear high out-of-pocket health-care costs
Assessing the Health and Economic Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic in Palestine
No full texthttps://www.mas.ps/files/server/20210905223957-1.pd
An Operationalizing Theoretical Framework for the Analysis of Universal Health Coverage Reforms: First Test on an Archetype Developing Economy
No full textThis paper presents an operationalizing theoretical framework to analyze the potential effects of universal health coverage (UHC) using dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model. The DSGE encapsulates a set of heterogeneous households that optimize their intertemporal utility of consumption, health capital, and leisure. The model is calibrated to capture the salient features of an archetype developing economy. The model is, then, used to simulate alternative UHC-financing policies. The theoretical framework we propose can be easily adapted to assess the implementation of UHC in a particular developing country setting. When applied to a hypothetical country, results show that the implementation of UHC can indeed improve access to healthcare for the population while offering households financial protection against future uncertainty. However, the degree of financial risk protection appears to vary across heterogeneous households and UHC-financing policies, depending on the associated benefits and the additional burden borne by each group
Assessing the Health and Economic Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic in Palestine
No full texthttps://www.mas.ps/files/server/20210905223957-1.pd
Measurement of Social Welfare and Inequality in Presence of Partially-ordered Variables
No full textWe address the question of the measurement of social welfare and inequalities in the context of partially-ordered health variables. We propose a general framework based on the assumption that the distribution of well-being states forms an m-dimensional Boolean lattice. To this end, the distribution of well-being states is constructed based on the prevalence of a finite number of illnesses where each state represents the number of illnesses an individual may suffer from. The implementation of the framework involves breaking down the Boolean lattice into a set of linear extensions where all health states become fully ordered. The linear extensions account for all possible ordering of the health states based on the depth of health problems (i.e., the severity of health conditions). Having constructed these linear extensions, we then proceed on ranking distributions in terms of welfare by applying appropriate dominance criteria and employ aggregate metrics to provide a numerical representation of the social welfare and inequality associated with each distribution. An illustrative application of the methodology is provided
Assessing the Health and Economic Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic in Palestine
No full texthttps://www.mas.ps/files/server/20210905223957-1.pd
Assessing the Health and Economic Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic in Palestine
No full texthttps://www.mas.ps/files/server/20210905223957-1.pd
