1,721,134 research outputs found
Fever and its treatment among the more and less poor in Sub-Saharan Africa
Full text linkThe author empirically explores the relationship between household poverty and the incidence and treatment of fever--as an indicator of malaria--among children in Sub-Saharan Africa. He uses household Demographic and Health Survey data collected in the 1990s from 22 countriesin which malaria is prevalent. The analysis reveals a positive, but weak, association between reported fever and poverty. The geographic association becomes insignificant, however, after controlling for the mother's education. There is some evidence that higher levels of wealth in other households in the cluster in which the household lives are associated with lower levels of reported fever in Eastern and Southern Africa. Poverty and the type of care sought for an episode of fever are significantly associated: wealthier households are substantially more likely to seek care in the modern health sector. In Central and Western Africa those from richer households are more likely to seek care from all types of sources: government hospitals, lower-level public facilities such as health clinics, as well as private sources. In Eastern and Southern Africa the rich are primarily more likely to seek care from private facilities. In both regions there is substantial use of private facilities--use that increases with wealth. Like the incidence of fever, treatment-seeking behavior is strongly associated with the level of wealth in the cluster in which the child lives.Disease Control&Prevention,Health Systems Development&Reform,Public Health Promotion,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Early Child and Children's Health,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Poverty Assessment,Communicable Diseases,Statistical&Mathematical Sciences,Health Indicators
If you build it, will they come? School availability and school enrollment in 21 poor countries
Full text linkIncreasing the supply of schools is commonly advocated as a policy intervention to promote schooling. Analysis of the relationship between the school enrollment of 6 to 14 year olds and the distance to primary and secondary schools in 21 rural areas in low-income countries (including some of the poorest countries in Sub-Saharan Africa) reveals that the two are often statistically significantly related. However, the magnitudes of the associations are small. Simulating big reductions in distance yields only small increases in average school participation, and only small reductions in within-country inequality. The data are mostly cross-sectional and therefore it is difficult to assess the degree to which results might be driven by endogenous school placement. Data can be geographically matched over time in three of the study countries and under some assumptions the results from these countries are consistent with no substantial bias in the cross-sectional estimates. Although increasing school availability by decreasing the average distance to schools can be a tool for increasing enrollments, it cannot be expected to have a substantial effect. Other interventions, such as those geared toward increasing the demand for schooling or increasing the quality of schooling should be prioritized.Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Teaching and Learning,Public Health Promotion,Primary Education,Education Reform and Management,Primary Education,Teaching and Learning,Education Reform and Management,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Gender and Education
Disability, poverty, and schooling in developing countries : results from 11 household surveys
Full text linkThis paper analyzes the relationship between whether a young person has a disability, the poverty status of their household, and their school participation using 11 household surveys from nine developing countries. Between 1 and 2 percent of the population is identified as having a disability. Youth with disabilities sometimes live in poorer households, but the extent of this concentration is typically neither large nor statistically significant. However, youth with disabilities are almost always substantially less likely to start school, and in some countries have lower transition rates resulting in lower schooling attainment. The order of magnitude of the school participation disability deficit is often larger than those associated with other characteristics such as gender, rural residence, or economic status differentials.Social Cohesion,Social Protections&Assistance,Gender and Law,Primary Education,Health Monitoring&Evaluation
Are there diminishing returns to transfer size in conditional cash transfers ?
Full text linkThere is increasing evidence that conditional cash transfer programs can have large impacts on school enrollment, including in very poor countries. However, little is known about which features of program design -- including the amount of the cash that is transferred, how frequently conditions are monitored, whether non-complying households are penalized, and the identity or gender of the cash recipients -- account for the observed outcomes. This paper analyzes the impact of one feature of program design -- namely, the magnitude of the transfer. The analysis uses data from a program in Cambodia that deliberately altered the transfer amounts received by otherwise comparable households. The findings show clear evidence of diminishing marginal returns to transfer size despite the fact that even the larger transfers represented on average only 3 percent of the consumption of the median recipient households. If applicable to other settings, these results have important implications for other programs that transfer cash with the explicit aim of increasing school enrollment levels in developing countries.Tertiary Education,Access to Finance,Education For All,,Primary Education
Assessing asset indices
Full text linkThis paper compares how results using various methods to construct asset indices match results using per capita expenditures. The analysis shows that inferences about inequalities in education, health care use, fertility, child mortality, as well as labor market outcomes are quite robust to the specific economic status measure used. The 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 between per capita expenditures and an asset index. First is the extent to which per capita expenditures can be explained by observed household and community characteristics. In settings with small transitory shocks to expenditure, or with little measurement error in expenditure, the rankings yielded by the alternative approaches are most similar. Second is the extent to which expenditures are dominated by individually consumed goods such as food. Asset indices are typically derived from indicators of goods which are effectively public at the household level, while expenditures are often dominated by food, an almost exclusively private good. In settings where private goods such as food are the main component of expenditures, asset indices and per capita consumption yield the least similar results, although adjusting for economies of scale in household expenditures reconciles the results somewhat.Access to Finance,Investment and Investment Climate,Population Policies,Debt Markets,Health Systems Development&Reform
Trends and socioeconomic gradients in adult mortality around the developing world
Full text linkThe authors combine data from 84 Demographic and Health Surveys from 46 countries to analyze trends and socioeconomic differences in adult mortality, calculating mortality based on the sibling mortality reports collected from female respondents aged 15-49. The analysis yields four main findings. First, adult mortality is different from child mortality: while under-5 mortality shows a definite improving trend over time, adult mortality does not, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa. The second main finding is the increase in adult mortality in Sub-Saharan African countries. The increase is dramatic among those most affected by the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Mortality rates in the highest HIV-prevalence countries of southern Africa exceed those in countries that experienced episodes of civil war. Third, even in Sub-Saharan countries where HIV-prevalence is not as high, mortality rates appear to be at best stagnating, and even increasing in several cases. Finally, the main socioeconomic dimension along which mortality appears to differ in the aggregate is gender. Adult mortality rates in Sub-Saharan Africa have risen substantially higher for men than for women—especially so in the high HIV-prevalence countries. On the whole, the data do not show large gaps by urban/rural residence or by school attainment.Population Policies,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Demographics,Statistical&Mathematical Sciences,Early Child and Children's Health
Does Indonesia have a"low-pay"civil service?
Full text linkGovernment officials and polcy analysts maintain that Indonesia's civil servants are poorly paid and have been for decades. This conclusion is supported by anecdotal evidence and casual empiricism. The authors systematically analyze the realtionship between government and private compensation levels using data from two large household surveys carried out by Indonesia's Central Bureau of Statistics: the 1998 Sakernas and 1999 Susenas. The results suggest that government workers with a high school education or less, representing three-quarters of the civil service, earn a pay premium over their private sector counterparts. Civil servants with more than a high school education earn less than they would in the private sector but, on average, the premium is far smaller than commonly is alleged and is in keeping with public/private differentials in other countries. These results prove robust to varying econometric specifications and cast doubt on low pay as an explanation for government corruption.Decentralization,Public Health Promotion,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,National Governance,Knowledge Economy,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,NationalGovernance,Knowledge Economy,Education for the Knowledge Economy,Parliamentary Government
Estimating the world at work
Full text linkAddressing the question,"What is the work status of the world's working-age population and subgroups thereof?"The author gathers data for many countries and infers data where it is missing (which requires making"heroic assumptions"). The results are of course only as good as the data are representative and accurate. Data are least reliable for sub-Saharan Africa. The high-income group is dominated (in population) by the United States, Germany, and Japan, which account for 58 percent of that group's working-age population. The middle-income group is dominated by Indonesia, the Russian Federation, and Brazil, which account for 40 percent of that group's working-age population. The low-income group is dominated by China and India, which account for 70 percent of that group's working-age population. Among other things, the author's charts and tables show the breakdown on working-age employment - in services, industry, agriculture - and unemployment in various parts of the world.Earth Sciences&GIS,Labor Policies,Environmental Economics&Policies,Public Health Promotion,Health Economics&Finance,Youth and Governance,Demographics,Health Economics&Finance,Environmental Economics&Policies,Labor Markets
The structure of social disparities in education : gender and wealth
Full text linkUsing internationally comparable household data sets (Demographic and Health Surveys), the author investigates how gender and wealth interact to generate within country inequalities in educational enrollment and attainment. He carries out multivariate analysis to assess the partial relationship between educational outcomes and gender, wealth, household characteristics (including level of education of adults, in the households), and community characteristics (including the presence of schools in the community). He finds that: 1) women are at a great educational disadvantage in countries in South Asia and North, Western, and Central Africa. 2) Gender gaps are large in a subset of countries, but wealth gaps are large in almost all of the countries studied. Moreover, in some countries where there is a heavy female disadvantage in enrollment (Egypt, India, Morocco, Niger, and Pakistan), wealth interacts with gender to exacerbate the gap in the educational outcomes. In India, for example, where there is a 2.5 percentage point difference between male and female enrollment for children from the richest households, the difference is 34 percentage points for children from the poorest households. 3) The education level of adults in the household has a significant impact on the enrollment of children in all the countries studied, even after controlling for wealth. The effect of the educational level of adult female is larger than that of the education level of adult males in some, but not all, of the countries studied. 4) The presence of a primary and a secondary school in the community has a significant relationship with enrollment in some countries only (notably in Western and Central Africa). The relationship appears not to systematically differ by children's gender.Public Health Promotion,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Primary Education,Teaching and Learning,Early Childhood Development,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Primary Education,Teaching and Learning,Poverty Assessment,Early Childhood Development
Fever and Its Treatment among the More and Less Poor in Sub-Saharan Africa
No full textThe author empirically explores the
relationship between household poverty and the incidence and
treatment of fever--as an indicator of malaria--among
children in Sub-Saharan Africa. He uses household
Demographic and Health Survey data collected in the 1990s
from 22 countries in which malaria is prevalent. The
analysis reveals a positive, but weak, association between
reported fever and poverty. The geographic association
becomes insignificant, however, after controlling for the
mother's education. There is some evidence that higher
levels of wealth in other households in the cluster in which
the household lives are associated with lower levels of
reported fever in Eastern and Southern Africa. Poverty and
the type of care sought for an episode of fever are
significantly associated: wealthier households are
substantially more likely to seek care in the modern health
sector. In Central and Western Africa those from richer
households are more likely to seek care from all types of
sources: government hospitals, lower-level public facilities
such as health clinics, as well as private sources. In
Eastern and Southern Africa the rich are primarily more
likely to seek care from private facilities. In both regions
there is substantial use of private facilities--use that
increases with wealth. Like the incidence of fever,
treatment-seeking behavior is strongly associated with the
level of wealth in the cluster in which the child lives
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