Comprising original and never-before-published papers by distinguished economists, this book offers insights about lessons that were or should have been learned from recent outbreaks of such crises in East Asia and elsewhere. Recent Financial Crises also presents a set of econometric studies of...

Good estimates of nutrient intake responses to prices and income are very useful for the evaluation of the numerous efforts to improve nutrition in many developing countries through price-subsidy and income-generation policies. We discuss three problems in standard estimates of these responses...

This paper analyses the effect of being insured under the voluntary component of Vietnamese Health Insurance, on patterns of treatment seeking behaviour. A multinomial logit model is estimated using household survey data from three provinces in Vietnam. Decisions regarding both the type of...

In this study we use data from rural India to examine the impact of the birth of a boy relative to the birth of a girl (i.e., the "gender shock") on the savings, consumption and income of rural Indian households. We find that the gender shock reduces savings for medium and large farm households,...

For the past decade, South Asian governments have been investing heavily to achieve the education millennium development goals (MDGs). The region has also made great progress in enrolling girls in both primary and secondary school. The rapid gains in enrollment have not been accompanied by...

This report covers education from primary through upper secondary school. Given its importance for school readiness, this report also reviews early childhood development even though that is outside formal education systems in the region. This study is the first to comprehensively analyse the...

The process of acquiring an infection has two components: first, exposure through proximity to another infected individual, and second, transmission of the disease. Earlier studies of the socioeconomic factors that affect the probability of acquiring an illness assume uniform exposure to...