The present paper attempts to find out the major determining factors of catastrophic payment in health care, and the impact of such expenditure on household economic status. A survey of 3150 households in West Bengal, India, was analyzed using multivariate logistic regression models to identify factors associated with catastrophic health expenditures, defined as household spending on health gre...

STUDY OBJECTIVE To test the validity of proxy measures of household wealth and income that can be readily implemented in health surveys in rural Africa. DESIGN Data are drawn from four different integrated household surveys. The assumptions underlying the choice of wealth proxy are described, and correlations with the true value are assessed in two different settings. The expenditure proxy is...

The Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS) has been conducting household surveys for several years using a sampling frame based on the 1986 Egypt census data, and an updated listing of households in sample “chunks.” One of the last surveys conducted using this frame was the 1995/96 Household Income, Expenditure and Consumption Survey (HIECS). The sample design for this s...

With the rapidly changing economic environments and numerous challenges hindering smallholders’ adoption of externally developed technologies, it is often argued that farmers’ innovations may be essential in the livelihoods of rural farm households and need to be promoted. Yet a rigorous assessment of the impacts of farmer innovation is lacking. Consequently, we analyse the effect of farmer inn...

AIMS Dental services differ from other health services in several dimensions. One important difference is that a substantial share of costs of dental services-especially costs beyond routine dental treatment-is paid directly by the patient out-of-pocket. SETTINGS AND DESIGN This study analyses the socio-economic determinants of out-of-pocket expenditure for dental services (OOPE) in Austria a...

The primary aim of this paper is to examine whether resources accruing to different members of the household and from different sources have differential impacts on household expenditure patterns. The issue is of considerable policy interest for, if the identity of the income recipient does matter in the household’s expenditure decisions, then it indicates the usefulness of targeting income ass...

With numerous challenges hindering smallholders’ adoption of externally developed technologies, it is often argued that farmer innovation can play an essential role in rural livelihoods. Yet a rigorous assessment of the impact of farmer innovation is lacking. We address this issue by analyzing the effect of farmer innovation on household welfare, measured by income, consumption expenditure, and...

This paper presents and investigates a new class of equivalent-expenditure functions that is a generalization of the one that corresponds to exact (independent-of-base) equivalence scales. It provides less restrictive household demands, especially for children’s goods, and has associated equivalence scales that may depend on expenditure. We show that, under certain conditions, equivalent-expend...

BACKGROUND At the beginning of 2007, health care reforms were implemented in Hungary in order to decrease public expenditure on health care. Reforms involved the increase of co-payments for pharmaceuticals and the introduction of co-payments for health care services. OBJECTIVE The objective of this paper is to examine the progressivity of household expenditure on health care during the reform...

BACKGROUND Out of pocket (OOP) health spending can potentially expose households to risk of incurring large medical bills, and this may impact on their welfare. This work investigates the effect of catastrophic OOP on the incidence and depth of poverty in Malawi. METHODS The paper is based on data that was collected from 12,271 households that were interviewed during the third Malawi integrat...