Health

How can cost-effective interventions help improve healthcare in developing countries? Evidence from 16 countries sheds light on recent innovations aimed at increasing access and quality.

Twenty years after the Lord's Resistance Army conflict ended in northern Uganda, women who were abducted as children during the war and subsequently released show significantly higher rates of depression and perceived stress, reduced social support, ...

When El Salvador deployed community health teams, the result was not simply more primary care – it was better-organised care, with more prevention, less infectious disease, and fewer patients ending up in hospital for conditions that should never hav...

Mortality among infants significant increased during the first nationwide COVID-19 lockdown in India, not because infants were infected, but because the pandemic disrupted healthcare access, worsened economic conditions, and discouraged mothers from ...

Policies based on providing information rely on people engaging with it. But how can we design effective information campaigns when people are tempted to ignore them? Evidence from India shows that when people perceive that they have control over out...

In rural India, subsidising family planning services gets women to the clinic, but pairing subsidies with a ‘Bring-a-Friend’ voucher changes who accompanies them, reduces stigma, and delivers meaningful gains in contraceptive use.

A government-endorsed supplemental insurance scheme in China expanded coverage for hundreds of millions of people, but also crowded out private insurance purchases, suggesting that enrolment growth alone overstates the true gains in risk protection.

The relationship between poverty and health is bidirectional and context-dependent, making it far harder to address through policy than it might appear. While public health insurance and a focus on prevention offer the most promising routes to improving health among the poor, cash transfers and other income interventions have yielded ambiguous results.

Outsourcing the management of public hospitals in Brazil to private operators increased hospital output and productivity without harming quality or equity, expanding access and reducing mortality, with the gains depending critically on the managerial...