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...

This paper exploits the staggered rollout of Thailand's universal health coverage scheme to estimate its impacts on whether individuals report themselves as being too ill to work. The statistical power comes from the fact that there is an average of 62,000 respondents in the labor force survey...

This paper looks at differential progress on the health Millennium Development Goals between the poor and better-off within countries. The findings are based on original analysis of 235 Demographic and Health Surveys and Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys, spanning 64 developing countries over...

Health systems are not just about improving health: good ones also ensure that people are protected from the financial consequences of receiving medical care. Anecdotal evidence suggests health systems often perform badly in this respect, apparently with devastating consequences for households,...

The post-communist transition to social health insurance in many of the Central and Eastern European and Central Asian countries provides a unique opportunity to try to answer some of the unresolved issues in the debate over the relative merits of social health insurance and tax-financed health...

This paper shows how value judgments can be explicitly recognized in measuring health ineqalities between the poor and the better-off, and how such inequalities can be included in assessments of countries' health indicators