BACKGROUND Out-of-pocket (OOP) medical payments can lead to catastrophic health expenditure and impoverishment. We quantified household OOP expenditure for treatment of childhood pneumonia and diarrhoea and its impact on poverty for different socioeconomic groups in Ethiopia. METHODS This study employs a mix of retrospective and prospective primary household data collection for direct medical...

BACKGROUND As the drive towards universal coverage is gaining momentum globally, the need for assessing levels of financial health protection in countries, particularity the developing world, has increasingly become important. In Swaziland, the level of financial health protection is not clearly understood. OBJECTIVE To assess financial catastrophe and impoverishment from out-of-pocket paymen...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES The provision of affordable health care is generally considered a fundamental goal of a welfare state. In addition to its role in maintaining and improving the health status of individuals and households, it impacts the economic prosperity of a society through its positive effects on labor productivity. Given this context, this paper assesses socioeconomic-differential...

FastSLAM is a framework for simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) using a Rao-Blackwellized particle filter. However, FastSLAM degenerates over time. This degeneracy is due to the fact that a particle set estimating the pose of the robot loses its diversity. One of the main reasons for losing particle diversity in FastSLAM is sample impoverishment. In this case, most of the particle weig...

The study investigates the association between tobacco and alcohol use, and the potential risk of impoverishment from borrowing and distress selling of assets for meeting costs of hospitalization in India. Data from the fifty-second round of the National Sample Survey, a representative survey of 120,942 households across India, were used to investigate the likelihood and the levels of borrowing...

Amazonian rainforests sustain some of the richest tree communities on Earth, but their ecological and evolutionary responses to human threats remain poorly known. We used one of the largest experimental datasets currently available on tree dynamics in fragmented tropical forests and a recent phylogeny of angiosperms to test whether tree communities have lost phylogenetic diversity since their i...

BACKGROUND In India, Non Communicable Diseases (NCDs) and injuries account for an estimated 62% of the total age-standardized burden of forgone Disability Adjusted Life Years (DALYs). Public and private financing of clinical services to reduce the NCD burden is a major challenge. METHODS We used National Sample Survey Organization (NSSO) survey data from 1995-96 and 2004 covering nearly 200 t...

BACKGROUND Setting Millennium Development Goals and Sustainable Development Goals for health has largely focused on defining specific targets of mortality and morbidity reduction over given time periods. Yet, less attention has been devoted to setting targets for the systemic determinants of health delivery, such as access and financial risk protection (FRP)-prevention of medical impoverishment...

This study characterizes the Andalusian economy as an extractive economy. First, we alalyze historical conditions that shaped dependent position of capitalism and consolidated a productive structure based mainly on extraction resources from nature, such in agriculture agri-food industries. Next, how extractivist model Andalusia operates 21st century by analyzing its basic features: intensificat...