Journal ArticleDOI
Public social spending in Africa : do the poor benefit?
TLDR
In this article, the authors examined the effectiveness of public social spending on education and health care in several African countries and found that these programs favor not the poor, but those who are better-off.Abstract:
Education and health care are basic services essential in any effort to combat poverty and are often subsidized with public funds to help achieve that purpose. This paper examines the effectiveness of public social spending on education and health care in several African countries and finds that these programs favor not the poor, but those who are better-off. It concludes that this targeting problem cannot be solved simply by adjusting the subsidy program. The constraints that prevent the poor from taking advantage of these services must also be addressed if the public subsidies are to be effective. Measuring the benefits of publicly provided goods to individuals is a matter of longstanding concern in the economics literature. For market-based goods and services, the prices consumers pay can be taken as reflecting underlying values and can be used to yield measures of welfare that can be compared across individuals and over time.read more
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Journal ArticleDOI
Making Services Work for Poor People
TL;DR: The authors examines the experience with alternative mechanisms for service delivery, contracting out to the private and NGO sectors, community participation, co-financing by service beneficiaries and shows that this, as well as the experience of more traditional public sector provision, can be interpreted by looking at three principal-agent relationships in the service-delivery chain: between policymakers and providers, between clients and providers; and between clients (as citizens) and policymakers.
Journal ArticleDOI
Trade Liberalization and Poverty: The Evidence So Far
TL;DR: The authors assesses the current state of evidence on the impact of trade policy reform on poverty in developing countries and argues that there is no simple generalizable conclusion about the relationship between trade liberalization and poverty, and the picture is much less negative than is often suggested.
Journal ArticleDOI
The effect of household wealth on educational attainment: evidence from 35 countries.
Deon Filmer,Lant Pritchett +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors used household survey data from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) from 44 surveys (in 35 countries) to document different patterns in the enrollment and attainment of children from rich and poor households.
Posted Content
On Decomposing the Causes of Health Sector Inequalities with an Application to Malnutrition Inequalities in Vietnam
TL;DR: Wagstaff et al. as mentioned in this paper proposed a method for decomposing inequalities in the health sector into their causes, by coupling the concentration index with a regression framework, and showed how changes in inequality over time, and differences across countries, can be decomposed into the following: - Changes due to changing inequalities in determinants of the variable of interest. - Changes in the means of the determinants.
Journal ArticleDOI
On decomposing the causes of health sector inequalities with an application to malnutrition inequalities in Vietnam
TL;DR: In this article, the authors propose a method for decomposing inequalities in the health sector into their causes, by coupling the concentration index with a regression framework, and show how changes in inequality over time, and differences across countries, can be decomposed into the following: changes due to changing inequalities of the determinants of the variable of interest.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI
Large Cash Transfers to the Elderly in South Africa
Anne Case,Angus Deaton +1 more
TL;DR: The authors examined the social pension in South Africa, where large cash sums-about twice the median per capita income of African households-are paid to people qualified by age but irrespective of previous contributions.
Posted Content
Poverty and household size
Peter Lanjouw,Martin Ravallion +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors find that the correlation between poverty and household size vanishes in Pakistan when the size elasticity of the cost of living is about 0.6, which is the elasticity implied by a modified version of the food-share method of setting scales.
BookDOI
Equity and growth in developing countries : old and new perspectives on the policy issues
TL;DR: Bruno, Ravallion, and Squire as discussed by the authors found no sign in the new cross-country data they assembled that growth has any systematic impact on inequality, and they suggested that the relationship between growth and distribution is not as simple as some theories have held.
Journal ArticleDOI
Poverty and household size
Peter Lanjouw,Martin Ravallion +1 more
TL;DR: The authors found that the correlation between poverty and size vanishes in Pakistan when the size elasticity of the cost of living is about 0.6, which turns out to be the elasticity implied by a modified version of the food share method of setting scales.
Journal ArticleDOI
Willingness to pay: a valid and reliable measure of health state preference?
TL;DR: Large variation in WTP responses may compromise this measure's discriminant validity, but there is some evidence of convergent validity for WTP with preferences measured by standard gamble, and the test-retest reliability of WTP is comparable to those of other preference measures.