Publications

Rwanda’s performance-based incentives were effective for some indicators, but unconditional financing also induced improvements. The incentive effects persisted in the mediumrun and as the program was scaled-up.

In recent years, many global health institutions have adopted eligibility and transition frameworks for the countries they support, generating questions about how these frameworks apply in practice—and whether global health progress will be put at risk through premature or poorly planned transition processes. 

In this paper we combine fourteen years of high-resolution satellite data on forest loss with individual-level survey data on malaria in more than 60,000 rural children in 17 countries in Africa, and fever in more than 470,000 rural children in 41 countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. We did not find that deforestation increases malaria prevalence nor that intermediate levels of forest cover have higher malaria prevalence.

There is longstanding debate about the contribution of family planning programs to fertility decline. Studying the staggered introduction of family planning across Malaysia during the 1960s and 1970s, we find modest responses in fertility behavior. Overall, Malaysia’s total fertility rate declined by about one quarter birth under family planning, explaining only about 10 percent of the national fertility decline between 1960 and 1988. Our findings are consistent with growing evidence that global fertility decline is predominantly due to underlying changes in the demand for children.

We analyzed a large-scale municipal water disinfection program in Mexico in 1991 that rapidly increased access to chlorinated water. Our results suggest that childhood diarrheal disease mortality in Mexico would have declined by 86 percent if all municipalities had good quality infrastructure—a decline consistent with historical experience.

We assessed the methodological quality of global health program evaluations from five major funders between 2009 and 2014. We found that most evaluations did not meet social science methodological standards in terms of relevance, validity, and reliability. Nevertheless, good quality evaluations made it possible to identify ten recommendations for improving evaluations, including a robust finding that early planning is associated with better quality.

Millions Saved (2016) is a new edition of detailed case studies on the attributable impact of global health programs at scale. As an input to the book, this paper provides an independent assessment of the cost-effectiveness of a selection of the cases using ex post information from impact evaluations, with the objective of illustrating how economic evaluation can be used in decision making and to provide further evidence on the extent of health gains produced for the funding provided.

This paper uses contract theory to suggest simple contract designs that could be used by the Global Fund. Using a basic model of procurement, we lay out five alternative options and consider when each is likely to be most appropriate. We ultimately provide a synthesis to guide policy makers as to when and how 'results-based' incentive contracts can be used in practice.