OBJECTIVES To analyse differences in smoking behaviour and smoking expenditures among low and high income households in China and the impact of smoking on standard of living of low income households in China. METHODS About 3400 urban and rural households from 36 townships/districts in southwest China were interviewed in 2002. Cross tabulations and regression analysis were used to examine the ...

Abstract: On December 2010, the government of Iran ended the decades-long subsidy program for bread and energy products and launched the Targeted Subsidy Reform program that considerably raised prices of food products. The objective of the study was to measure welfare impacts of food price changes on Iranian urban households between two survey data of 2009/10 and 2011/12 which were taken from I...

OBJECTIVES To compare food expenditure patterns between low-income households and higher- income households in the Canadian population, and to examine the relationship between food expenditure patterns and the presence or absence of housing payments among low-income households. DESIGN Secondary data analysis of the 1996 Family Food Expenditure Survey conducted by Statistics Canada. SETTING ...

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...

We created a comprehensive set of health-system performance measurements for China nationally and regionally, with health-system coverage and catastrophic medical spending as major indicators. With respect to performance of health-care delivery, China has done well in provision of maternal and child health services, but poorly in addressing non-communicable diseases. For example, coverage of ho...

Using a 5-year household panel data from Korea, this paper identifies the vulnerable households and their coping strategies during 1994-1998. We find that (i) larger households tend to be more protected from shortfalls in consumption; (ii) households with young children tend to decrease consumption of other items to achieve higher spending on children’s education; (iii) female-headed households...

A cross-sectional study was carried out to assess the impact of perceived quality and cost of utilisation of primary health care services, in relation to malaria, in rural and urban districts in Tanzania. This study intended to explore whether there are differences between rural and urban users in terms of their perceptions of quality of health services and how these perceptions affect househol...