Up to now, the High Level Panel on the Post-2015 Development Agenda (sadly still not widely AKA the HiPoPoDomAe) has done a pretty good job of displaying public collegiality. But in the lead-up to today’s Panel meetings in New York, that began to break down. A story in the Guardian suggested that drafts of the report have been described as “absolutely awful&q
The New England Journal of Medicine recently published the results of “the Oregon experiment” based on the 2008 US Medicaid program expansion in Oregon. The study is one of very few randomized control trials on publicly-subsidized health insurance that exists to guide health policy, and found what some commentators considered a disappointing result: while health care utilization increased and households were protected from financial hardship, expanding Medicaid coverage had “no significant impact on measured physical health outcomes over a 2-year period.”
Earlier this year, Nancy Birdsall and I laid out why India’s new cash transfer program is superior to current in-kind subsidy programs on which the government spends $26 billion a year with no discernible impact on poverty. While not a panacea, the new program has a lot going for it – cash transfers have been shown to work for poverty reduction in many settings, the program uses a biometrics-based system to identify beneficiaries and process payments, and the country has experience in implementing similar programs like the JSY – a cash transfer conditional on a facility birth.
Although counting the sick and dead in a country can seem quite dull if not morbid, these facts are critical inputs to designing any national health policy, let alone global priorities in health. Yet 85% of the world's population still lack systems that register births and deaths along with high-quality data on causes of death.
As mentioned in our last post, aid agencies are experimenting with programs that incorporate the main features of COD Aid: paying for outputs and outcomes, giving the recipient greater discretion to spend as they see fit, independent verification, and transparency. Once these results-based programs are up and running, they face a critical test when the first results are reported. In particular, most programs create expectations by setting annual targets and are then judged relative to those targets rather than to their baseline. And this means that even successful programs will be viewed as failures (a point also made in an earlier blog). By refusing to set targets, a results-based program can avoid this pitfall. How is it that targets can create such a problem?
Last week saw the High Level Panel on the Post-2015 Agenda meeting in Liberia. Apparently various panel members used the occasion to lay out their vision for goals and targets for 2030. And according to Save the Children’s Brendan Cox, there was a lot of discussion around the “fact that we can get to zero on so many issues.” Save the Children’s very interesting report on post-2015 is heavy on
I'm delighted to congratulate my colleague David Roodman on his winning the first ever Editor's Prize of the Stata Journal for his 2009 and 2011 articles. Here is one of the more easily understood bits of the citation:
The US government spends about $6.4 billion a year on preventing and treating HIV/AIDS in the developing world, and 4.5 million AIDS patients depend mostly on US generosity each day for the AIDS medicines that keep them alive.
Although President Obama will be plenty busy during the remainder of his first term working with Congress to avoid the fiscal cliff, he need not wait until the start of his second term to further his vision for making US policy more supportive of global poverty reduction.
In this post, Gabriel Demombynes, Senior Economist in the Nairobi office of the World Bank, describes some of the issues raised at the Center for Global Development and the African Population & Health Research Center’s first meeting of the Data for African Development Working Group meeting last month. This blog was originally posted to the World Bank’s Development Impact Blog on October 1, 2012.
by Gabriel Demombynes
Recently I attended the inaugural meeting of the Data for African Development Working Group put together by the Center for Global Development and the African Population & Health Research Center here in Nairobi. The group aims to improve data for policymaking on the continent and in particular to overcome “political economy” problems in data collection and dissemination.