This book reviews Vietnam's successes and the challenges it faces, and goes on to suggest some options for further reforming the country's health system. Options for expanding coverage to 100 percent of the population are compared. The issue of how to deepen coverage, so that insurance reduces...

This book began in 2003 during the initial formulations of China's 11th five-year plan, which covers the period 2006-10. During the entire period, the rural health Analytic and Advisory Activities (AAA) team analyzed the sector and debated reform options with government officials and scholars....

Health services can make an important contribution to improved health conditions among disadvantaged groups. Yet as the contents of this volume make clear, the health services supported by governments, and by agencies like ours too often fail to reach these people who need them most. This is not...

Inefficiency is commonplace, yet exercises aimed at improving provider performance efforts to date to measure inefficiency and use it in benchmarking exercises have not been altogether satisfactory. This paper proposes a new approach that blends the themes of Data Envelopment Analysis and the...

This paper takes a bibliometric tour of the past 40 years of health economics using bibliographic "metadata" from EconLit supplemented by citation data from Google Scholar and the authors' topical classifications. The authors report the growth of health economics (33,000 publications since 1969...

It is generally accepted that government health expenditures should disproportionately benefit the poor. And yet in most developing countries the opposite is the case. This paper examines the implications of a central assumption of benefit incidence analysis, namely that the unit cost of a...

In Laos health shocks are more common than most other shocks and more concentrated among the poor. They tend to be more idiosyncratic than non-health shocks, and are more costly, partly because they lead to high medical expenses, but also because they lead to income losses that are sizeable...

The extent of premature death and ill health in the developing world is staggering. In 2000 almost 11 million children died before their fifth birthday, an estimated 140 million children under five are underweight, 3 million died from HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis claimed another 2 million lives, and...

Bibliometric measures based on citations are widely used in assessing the scientific publication records of authors, institutions and journals. Yet currently favored measures lack a clear conceptual foundation and are known to have counter-intuitive properties. The authors propose a new approach...

The World Bank has produced a huge volume of books and papers on development -- 20,000 publications spanning decades, but growing appreciably since 1990. This paper finds evidence that many of these publications have influenced development thinking, as indicated by the citations found using...