Stephen D. Younger

Decomposing world health inequality

This study explores global inequality in health status and decomposes it into within- and between-country inequality. We rely on standardized height as our health indicator since it avoids the measurement pitfalls of more traditional measures of health such as morbidity, mortality, and life expectancy. It also avoids measurement problems associated with using monetary variables such as income or expenditure across time or place to compare welfare. Our calculation of world height inequality indicates that, in contrast with similar research on income inequality, within-country variation is the source of most inequality, rather than the differences between countries.

Aid and the Dutch disease: Macroeconomic management when everybody loves you

Countries that undertake serious and sustained programs of stabilization and structural adjustment should expect to attract significant new inflows of capital from donor countries and international institutions. While apparently beneficial, those flows can work at crosspurpose with other goals of the policy reforms. In particular, abundant foreign exchange loans can force an appreciation of the real exchange rate (often through domestic inflation rather than a nominal appreciation). In addition, since the government is almost always the recipient of these loans, it can crowd out the private sector if it increases its aggregate demand for domestic goods and services. If the crowding out is accomplished by tight monetary policy, it will fall primarily on private investment rather than consumption. This paper shows that both of these problems have surfaced in Ghana, a country that has become a favorite of donors after demonstrating a serious commitment to policies promoted by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. The paper also suggests modifications in macroeconomic policy that would help lower inflation and boost private investment.

Structural adjustment reconsidered : economic policy and poverty in Africa

Acknowledgements List of tables List of figures 1. Introduction 2. Poverty in Africa 3. Trade and exchange rate policy reforms 4. Fiscal policy 5. Agriculture and food markets Conclusion Notes Appendix References.

Exchange Rate, Fiscal and Agricultural Policies in Africa: Does Adjustment Hurt the Poor?

Trade, exchange rate, fiscal, and agricultural sector policy reforms are the pillars of structural adjustment programs in Africa. Results indicate that trade and exchange rate reforms are associated with a large decline in economic rents and a shift in relative prices that favor the rural and urban poor. Fiscal reforms have not brought about draconian belt-tightening measures, although the incidence of public spending, particularly in the social sectors and in terms of public sector employment, remains far from progressive. Reduction of export crop taxation contributes to higher incomes for the poor, and domestic food crop liberalization has not led to increases in purchase prices of staple commodities for most low-income households.

The Relative Progressivity of Social Services in Ecuador

This article examines the incidence of public subsidies to health and education services in Ecuador. In Ecuador, health and education services are the only public expenditures that consciously attempt to redistribute welfare to the poor. The methods combine demand estimates from the willingness-to-pay literature with welfare dominance tests, allowing a comparison of the standard benefit incidence analysis with the more sophisticated demand estimates. The results give a clear progressivity ordering for the public services examined: primary school subsidies are the most progressive, followed by health consultations for children, health consultations for adults and secondary education (which are statistically indistinguishable), and subsidies for tertiary education. Of these, only the first two have a significant impact on the distribution of per capita expenditure, inclusive of benefits. These results are remarkably consistent across the methods used.

Transfer payments, mothers' income and child health in ecuador

Abstract We evaluate the impact of the Bono Solidario, a transfer payment scheme in Ecuador, on childrens nutritional status. In addition to testing for pure income effects, because the programme transferred money to mothers of young children, we test whether mothers income has a stronger effect on childrens heights and weights than ordinary household income. We draw two main conclusions: that the Bono Solidario transfer payment scheme has had a statistically significant but quite modest impact on childrens nutritional status, and that this impact is no different than any other income effect on height and weight. In particular, the fact that the Bono is transferred to mothers has not made it more efficacious at reducing malnutrition than other household income.

Robust Multidimensional Poverty Comparisons with Discrete Indicators of Well-Being

This paper provides a method to make robust multidimensional poverty comparisons when one or more of the dimensions of well-being or deprivation is discrete. Sampling distributions for the statistics used in these poverty comparisons are provided. Several examples show that the methods are both practical and interesting in the sense that they can provide richer information than do univariate poverty comparisons.

Dominance Testing of Social Sector Expenditures and Taxes in Africa

This paper examines the progressivity of social sector expenditures and taxes in eight sub-Saharan African countries. It uses dominance tests to determine whether health and education expenditures redistribute resources to the poor. The paper finds that social services are poorly targeted. Among the services examined, primary education tends to be most progressive, and university education is least progressive. The paper finds that many taxes are progressive as well as efficient, including some broad-based taxes such as the VAT and wage taxation. Taxes on kerosene and exports appear to be the only examples of regressive taxes.

Decomposing World Education Inequality

We decompose global inequality in educational achievement into within- and betweencountry components. We find that the former is significantly larger. This is different than results for international income inequality, but similar to results for international health inequality.

Indirect Tax Incidence in Madagascar: Estimations Using the Input-Output Table

This study evaluates the incidence of Madagascars principal indirect taxes. It proposes an improved method for doing so, building on earlier work by Younger et al. That earlier work has evaluated tax incidence purely based on the distribution of final consumption by households. Using detailed consumption profiles from the EPM 1993/94, it is possible to impute the incidence of taxes paid by commodity and by income group. The innovation offered in this paper is to recognize that indirect taxes also raise producer input costs, which further upward pressure on producer prices. To capture this second source of tax impact on prices, this paper incorporates the 1995 Input-Output table for Madagascar in order to evaluate the price consequences of modified rates of taxation on intermediate production inputs.