The toilet gap: How much of differences across developing countries in child height can sanitation explain?
Guest post by Dean Spears
- Tags:
- India
- Health
- sanitation
India
Feigning illness to improve care: Recent lessons from standardized patients in rural
A key determinant of good health is the quality of the care that sick patients receive, and donor attention in the health sector is increasingly focused on quality of care investments such as enhanced training and supervision of health providers. This interest in the quality of care will only increase further in the coming years as the epidemiological transition shifts the relative disease burden towards chronic illnesses. Why? Because proper management of chronic illness requires repeated high quality interactions with the health system.
Party politics affects the spatial distribution of growth: Guest post by Paul Novosad
This is the sixth of our series of posts by PhD students on the job market.
Some promising-ish news on rainfall insurance
Index-based rainfall insurance offers the potential to allow farmers to protect themselves against one of the most important risks they face – the risk of drought (or conversely too much rain).
Do Things Have to Get Worse for Women Before They Get Better?
While the U.S Presidential Debate on Tuesday night brought to the fore issues of gender equity in the U.S.
The Impact of Vocational Training for Young Women in Delhi
One popular solution to unemployment is to provide the unemployed with more skills through training. However, the impacts of vocational training in developed countries have been at most modest.
Calling the Cops? Institutional Reform in the Rajasthan Police
An interesting new paper by Abhijit Banerjee, Raghabendra Chattopadhyay, Esther Duflo, Daniel Keniston, and Nina Singh shows how sometimes top-down reforms might be a good move through a look at a range of reforms tried out by the police in Rajasthan, India.
When it comes to female education, have we gotten it all backwards?
To get children to attend school in developing countries, our approach has been primarily to assume that the schooling that is available is worth pursuing, meaning that the problem must be with some barrier to go to school despite a great desire to do so: perhaps the family cannot afford the costs of schooling; perhaps the schools are not good or too far; perhaps the children want to be in school but the parents prefer food today to educated daughter tomorrow; maybe people don’t know the value of schooling, etc.
When women are in charge
In 1993 India adopted gender quotas for local councils. In particular, the position of chief councilor (or Pradhan) was reserved for women in 1/3 of the village councils in any given election – and this 1/3 was selected at random. As one might expect, this has led to a surge in the number of women holding this post. It also provides a ripe environment for impact evaluation work.
Schools is Good: A Reply to Lant Pritchett
Lant Pritchett once said to me “Thanks for the comments. As usual they are all very smart and well-informed and I disagree with most.” I feel similarly regarding his very popular piece posted here last week (already one of the top 10 most popular posts in our blog's short history) on how CCTs are forcing children in developing countries into terrible schools. So, here goes a reply…
Dear Lant,