AFRO-NETS> Three interesting online publications

[Claudio Schuftan <aviva@netnam.vn>]

Three interesting online publications
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[1] Premature Mortality and Poverty Measurement

Ravi Kanbur, Department of Economics, Cornell University, NY, USA 
Diganta Mukherjee, Economic Research Unit, Indian Statistical Insti-
tute, Kolkata, India
Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of Essex, Col-
chester, UK

ISER Working Papers - March 2003 - Number 2003-6

Available online as PDF file [26p.]at:
http://www.iser.essex.ac.uk/pubs/workpaps/pdf/2003-06.pdf

There is a glaring paradox in all commonly used measures of poverty. 
The death of a poor person reduces poverty according to these meas-
ures. This surely violates our basic intuitions of how poverty meas-
ures should behave. It cannot be right in concept that differentially 
higher mortality among the poor serves to reduce poverty. This paper 
begins the task of developing poverty measures that are not per-
versely mortality sensitive. A family of measures is proposed that is 
an intuitive modification of standard poverty measures to take into 
account the fact that the rich live longer than the poor.

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[2] Consumption, health, gender and poverty

Anne Case and Angus Deaton
Research Program in Development Studies
Princeton University

Working Paper No:3020, April 8, 2003
World Bank Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Network

Available online as PDF file [69p.] at:
http://econ.worldbank.org/files/25577_wps3020.pdf

This paper is concerned with methods for measuring poverty that allow 
men and women to be differentially poor. Standard methods of poverty 
measurement assume that an individual is poor if he or she lives in a 
family whose income or consumption lies below an appropriate poverty 
line. Such methods can provide only limited insight into male and fe-
male poverty separately. Nevertheless, there are reasons why house-
hold resources are linked to the gender composition of the household; 
women's earnings are often lower than men, families in some countries 
control their fertility through differential stopping rules, and 
women live longer than men. It is also possible to link family expen-
diture patterns to the gender composition of the household, something 
the authors illustrate using data from India and South Africa.

Such a procedure provides useful information on who gets what, but 
cannot tell us how total resources are allocated between males and 
females. More can be gleaned from data on consumption by individual 
household members, and for many goods, collecting such information is 
good survey practice in any case. Even so, it will be some time be-
fore such information can be used routinely to produce estimates of 
poverty by gender. A more promising approach is likely to come within 
a broader definition of poverty that includes health (and possibly 
education) as well as income.

The authors discuss recent work on collecting self-reported measures 
of nonfatal health and argue that such measures are already useful 
for assessing the relative health status of males and females. The 
evidence is consistent with non-elderly women generally having poorer 
health than non-elderly men. The authors emphasize the importance of 
simultaneously measuring poverty in multiple dimensions. The differ-
ent components of well-being are correlated, and it is misleading to 
look at any one in isolation from the others.


--

[3] Monitoring and evaluation of human resources for health: an in-
ternational perspective

Khassoum Diallo, Pascal Zurn, Neeru Gupta, Mario Dal Poz
Department of Health Service Provision, World Health Organization Ge-
neva, Switzerland

Human Resources for Health 2003 1:3 (published 14 April 2003)
Available as PDF [26p.] at:
http://www.human-resources-health.com/content/pdf/1478-4491-1-3.pdf


Despite the undoubted importance of human resources to the functions 
of health systems, there is little consistency between countries in 
how human resource strategies are monitored and evaluated. This paper 
presents an integrated approach for developing an evidence base on 
human resources for health (HRH) to support decision-making, drawing 
on a framework for health systems performance assessment.

>From a new journal called Human Resources for Health has just been 
launched and is published by BioMed Central, an independent publish-
ing house committed to providing immediate free access to peer-
reviewed biomedical research.

Human Resources for Health is ready to receive papers on all aspects 
of planning, producing and managing human resources for health. The 
journal web-site is at <http://www.human-resources-health.com/

The journal provides a means of disseminating relevant, high-quality 
research on human resources for health (HRH). It aims to improve un-
derstanding about producing and managing health care providers in a 
range of settings. 
--
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