Ignorance about the costs, case loads and case mixes of different hospitals within the public health system constitutes an important obstacle to reforming health care spending in many developing countries. National (tertiary) hospitals generally receive significantly larger budgets, per patient,...

Vitamin A deficiency (VAD) is a serious and widespread public health problem in the Philippines. Initiated in 1993, the Philippines National Vitamin A Supplementation Program (NVASP) is one of the oldest, most mature and comprehensive of its kind. This paper presents a cost-effectiveness and...

This introductory paper presents the results of an international multi-disciplinary research project on the measurement of food consumption in national household surveys. Food consumption data from household surveys are possibly the single most important source of information on poverty, food...

Using the Ugandan National Household Survey of 2005/06, we analyzed the production and consumption patterns of highland cooking banana (nakinyika) and sweet banana (sukalindizi). Informed by the empirical findings, we developed geographically differentiated adoption, production, consumption, and...

Since the early 1980s, the Ministries of Health of most Developing Countries have been plagued by significant and persistent resource shortages. One response of many Third World countries to this health financing crisis has been to turn to user fees. This article presents a case study of the...

This study analyzes the causes and effects of the persistent underfinancing of recurrent costs in the Ministry of Health (MOH) of El Salvador over the past decade. Causative factors identified and discussed include (1) a functionally unintegrated MOH structure--consisting of (a) the autonomous...