BACKGROUND In India, the process of decentralization of health services started taking shape in the mid-1990s. Systemic reforms envisaged delegation of administrative and financial responsibilities at district level for management of health-care institutions in 23 states of India in 1999. Subsequently, some of these reforms became part of the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) launched in 200...

The review highlights the poverty alleviation programmes of the government in the post-economic reform era to evaluate the contribution of these programmes towards reducing poverty in the country. The poverty alleviation programmes are classified into (i) self-employment programmes; (ii) wage employment programmes; (iii) food security programmes; (iv) social security programmes; and (v) urban p...

BACKGROUND Subjects with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) have disturbances in their spatial navigation abilities and exhibit early deficits in visuospatial short-term memory. The purpose of the present study was to determine whether a quantitative (span score) and qualitative (evaluating navigation strategies used) analysis of the Corsi test (usual condition and complex navigation task) would b...

this paper explores the effects of general and agricultural trade openness on economic freedom and alongside with the quality of institutions, on income and poverty. recent cross-country data for over 200 nations in global regions were used to estimate equations for income, poverty and economic freedom. economic freedom appears to have positive impacts on income levels, which together with good...

What supports deaf signers advantage over nonsigners on visuospatial short-term memory (STM) tasks is still a matter of debate. We compared the performance of 18 deaf Italian Sign Language (LIS) users with that of a matched group of Italian hearing nonsigners in three different tasks: two versions of the Corsi Block test, namely span forward and span backward, and the Visual Pattern Test (VPT)....

In the course of decentralization, pastoral communities in Namibia have had to find new ways to share their most salient resource, water, and the costs involved in providing it. Using data from sixty communities, we examine (1) whether and to what extent different sharing rules emerge, (2) how variations can be explained, (3) how rules are perceived and influence success, and (4) what economic ...