Pablo Gottret

Good Practices in Health Financing : Lessons from Reforms in Low and Middle-Income Countries

This volume focuses on nine countries that have completed, or are well along in the process of carrying out, major health financing reforms. These countries have significantly expanded their peoples health care coverage or maintained such coverage after prolonged political or economic shocks. In doing so, this report seeks to expand the evidence base on good performance in health financing reforms in low- and middle-income countries. The countries chosen for the study were Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Estonia, the Kyrgyz Republic, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Tunisia, and Vietnam. With health at the center of global development policy on humanitarian as well as economic and health security grounds, the international community and developing countries are closely focused on scaling up health systems to meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), improving financial protection, and ensuring long-term financing to sustain these gains. With the scaling up of aid, both donors and countries have come to realize that money alone cannot buy health gains or prevent impoverishment due to catastrophic medical bills. This realization has sent policy makers looking for reliable evidence about what works and what does not, but they have found little to guide their search.

Multiproduct Supply and Input Demand in U.S. Agriculture

Two sets of U.S. agricultural output supply and input demand relationships, including cross-price effects, are reported for five commodity groups and four variable input groups for the 1951–82 period. They are obtained by direct econometric estimation on U.S. data and by geographic aggregation from published econometric estimates for each of ten regions comprising the contiguous forty–eight states. The supply and demand formulations are specified on the assumptions of competitive behavior and an underlying normalized quadratic profit function. The effects of upward-sloping input supply curves are examined at the national level.

More and better jobs in South Asia

This book is divided into seven chapters. Chapter one is an overview. Chapter two reviews South Asias recent track record with regard to the quantity and quality of job creation. It traces the relationship of such job creation mostly to overall economic growth and attempts to answer what needs to be done to meet South Asias employment challenge. Chapter three discusses the key features of labor markets in South Asia, including where the better jobs are, who holds them, and the implications for the employment challenge ahead. Chapter four reviews the business environment constraints affecting, in particular, those firms that have expanded employment and discusses policy options for overcoming the most binding business constraints in South Asia. Chapter five analyzes the dimensions of the education and a skill challenge in the region and discusses policy priorities for improving the quality and skills of graduates of education and training systems. Chapter six reviews the role of labor market policies and institutions in encouraging job creation and protecting workers in the formal and informal economy and discusses possible directions for labor market policies, including options to increase the access of informal sector workers to programs that help them manage labor market shocks and improve their future earnings potential. Finally, chapter seven reviews the key constraints to job creation and the policy priorities for creating more and better jobs in conflict-affected areas.

Numeraire choice in normalized quadratic functional forms

A semi-nested test procedure is developed for choosing the numeraire for a normalized quadratic profit function when too few observations exist for nested hypothesis testing and when too many alternatives exis for conventional non-nested testing. Sensitivity of empirical results to choice of numeraire price is examined using agricultural data for the US and ten multistate regions. Few test conclusions vary by numeraire but own price input demand elasticities differ greatly.