Measuring Health: A Guide to Rating Scales and Questionnaires

Conditional cash transfers (CCTs) are programs that transfer cash, generally to poor households, on the condition that those households make pre specified investments in the human capital of their children. The report shows that there is good evidence that CCTs have improved the lives of poor people. Transfers generally have been well targeted to poor households, have raised consumption levels, and have reduced poverty, by a substantial amount in some countries. Offsetting adjustments that could have blunted the impact of transfers, such as reductions in the labor market participation of beneficiaries, have been relatively modest. The report also considers the rationale for conditioning the transfers on the use of specific health and education services by program beneficiaries. Thus CCTs have increased the likelihood that households will take their children for preventive health checkups, but that has not always led to better child nutritional status; school enrollment rates have increased substantially among program beneficiaries, but there is little evidence of improvements in learning outcomes. These findings suggest that to maximize their potential effects on the accumulation of human capital, CCTs should be combined with other programs to improve the quality of the supply of health and education services, and should provide other supporting services.

/pdf/conditional-cash-transfers-reducing-present-and-future-2c98i7vi5s.pdf

Conditional cash transfers : reducing present and future poverty

Cet article analyse les relations conceptuelles (imprecises) de la vulnerabilite, de la resilience et de la capacite d’adaptation aux changements climatiques selon le systeme socio-ecologique (socio-ecologigal systems – SES) afin de comprendre et anticiper le comportement des composantes sociales et ecologiques du systeme. Une serie de questions est proposee par l’auteur sur la specification de ces termes afin de developper une structure conceptuelle qui inclut les dimensions naturelles et so...

Linkages between vulnerability, resilience, and adaptive capacity

韧性（resilience）是指个人面对生活逆境、创伤、悲剧、威胁及其他生活重大压力的良好适应，也是个人应激（stress）和应对（coping）的正面结果。在过去的数十年，护理学等健康相关领域的学者们一直在关注为什么一些人在逆境、压力、疾病等高危（high risk）经历下也能较好地维持健康，而一些人则被逆境打败，身心健康也随之处于不良状态。近年来，应激心理学、健康心理学、精神医学、教育学、护理学等各学科对韧性概念越来越重视，尤其是临床领域的研究，从过去强调人的缺点和脆弱性的病理模式转变为关注个人的优势和强韧性的健康模式。

韧性（Resilience）的概念分析

The high and rising household savings rate in China is not easily reconciled with the traditional explanations that emphasize life cycle factors, the precautionary saving motive, financial development, or habit formation. This paper proposes a new competitive saving motive: as the sex ratio rises, Chinese parents with a son raise their savings in a competitive manner in order to improve their son’s relative attractiveness for marriage. The pressure on savings spills over to other households. Both cross-regional and household-level evidence supports this hypothesis. This factor can potentially account for about half the actual increase in the household savings rate during 1990–2007.

/pdf/the-competitive-saving-motive-evidence-from-rising-sex-1yh5ybr2qn.pdf

The Competitive Saving Motive: Evidence from Rising Sex Ratios and Savings Rates in China

Eradications of invasive species from over 1000 small islands around the world have created conservation arks, but to truly address the threat of invasive species to islands, eradications must be scaled by orders of magnitude. New Zealand has eradicated invasive predators from 10% of its offshore island area and now proposes a vision to eliminate them from the entire country. We review current knowledge of invasive predator ecology and control technologies in New Zealand and the biological research, technological advances, social capacity and enabling policy required. We discuss the economic costs and benefits and conclude with a 50-year strategy for a predator-free New Zealand that is shown to be ecologically obtainable, socially desirable, and economically viable. The proposal includes invasive predator eradication from the two largest offshore islands, mammal-free mainland peninsulas, very large ecosanctuaries, plus thousands of small projects that will together merge eradication and control concepts on landscape scales.

/pdf/predator-free-new-zealand-conservation-country-4evhm117c8.pdf

Predator-Free New Zealand: Conservation Country

http://abacus.bates.edu/~drieracr/CBBconference_files/Status%20Paper%20CBB.pdf

Positional spending and status seeking in rural China

https://www.ceaa.gc.ca/050/documents/49362/49362E.pdf

Modeling the costs and benefits of dam construction from a multidisciplinary perspective.

Evidence from developed and developing countries alike demonstrates a strongly positive relationship between religiosity and happiness, particularly for women and particularly among the elderly. Using survey data from the oldest old in China, we find a strong negative relationship between religious participation and subjective well-being in a rich multivariate logistic framework that controls for demographics, health and disabilities, living arrangements, wealth and income, lifestyle and social networks, and location. In contrast to other studies, we also find that religion has a larger effect on subjective well-being on men than women.

http://globalag.igc.org/health/world/2009/religionwellbeing.pdf

Religion and subjective well-being among the elderly in China

Since the dissolution of the Rural Cooperative Medical System at the end of the commune period, illness has emerged as a leading cause of poverty in rural China. To address the poor state of health care, the Chinese government unveiled the New Cooperative Medical System in 2002. Because local governments have been given significant control over program design, fundamental characteristics of the program vary from one county to the next. These differences may influence the decision to seek health care as well as the choice of hospital conditional on that initial decision. In this paper, we use a nested logit model to analyze household survey data from 25 counties to analyze the determinants of such health-seeking behavior. We find that age, the share of household expenditures allocated to food consumption (a measure of relative income), and the presence of other sick people in the household negatively affect the decision to seek health care while disability has a positive influence. Further, conditional on seeking treatment, the reimbursement scheme in place in each county and the average daily expenditure associated with hospitalization strongly influence hospital choice.

https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/63062/1508_ftp.pdf;sequence=1

Philip H. Brown

Papers

Predator-Free New Zealand: Conservation Country

Positional spending and status seeking in rural China

Modeling the costs and benefits of dam construction from a multidisciplinary perspective.

Religion and subjective well-being among the elderly in China

Health-seeking behavior and hospital choice in China's New Cooperative Medical System.