Over the last ten years, health has received a higher priority in development policies, as shown by a sharp increase in health expenditure. This increase will contribute effectively to poverty reduction only if such expenditure is efficient and if access to health services becomes more equitable. This paper contributes to the study of health equity in developing countries, with particular attention paid to child and maternal health services. We find that the poor benefit somewhat more than the rich from increased public health expenditures, but that the subsequent improvement in health equity is only marginal. In addition we find that access to health services depends considerably on the socioeconomic characteristics of households, most notably on the mother?s education level. A policy targeting schooling of girls would then significantly improve access to health services for the poor. Finally, we find that improvements in several dimensions of governance would also make access to health services appreciably more equitable.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.