Half of the 10 million children who die annually in the world are from Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). The reasons are known, but lack of will and resources avoid the development of sustainable policies. Associated factors to the high infant mortality rate (IMR) in SSA have been investigated in this research. An ecological multi-group study was designed comparing rates within SSA. The dependent varia...

Governments all over the world would like to improve the well being of its citizen. One aspects of well being can be seen through the quality of life (QoL) a person enjoys. Measuring and determining what is QoL is not an easy task. In this paper, using per-capita income as the yardstick for QOL, and the role of government through the way it spend its public money would be able to tell how ASEAN...

The relationship between local government structure and expenditure has received considerable attention, yet there is little consensus on how the features of representative government affect local expenditure decisions. The sole exception is city council size, which has consistently been found to have a positive and significant impact on expenditure. Previous results rely on cross-sectional est...

OBJECTIVE To investigate the use of time intervals in the treatment of fractured femurs as indicators of the quality of trauma systems. METHODS Time intervals from injury to admission, admission to surgery and surgery to discharge for patients with isolated femur fractures in four low- and middle-income countries were compared with the corresponding values from one German hospital, an Israeli...

BACKGROUND Access to appropriate and affordable healthcare is needed to achieve better health outcomes in Africa. However, access to healthcare remains low, especially among the poor. In Zambia, poor access exists despite the policy by the government to remove user fees in all primary healthcare facilities in the public sector. The paper has two main objectives: (i) to examine the factors assoc...

I develop a novel link between frictions in international financial markets and fiscal procyclicality. Complementing existing evidence, A decomposition of government expenditure into social spending and public good spending reveals that the cyclical correlation of social spending exhibits the biggest differences across countries. I build a small open economy model with income inequality, endoge...