Every Monday our authors provide a round-up of some of the most recently published peer reviewed articles from the field. We don’t cover everything, or even what’s most important – just a few papers that have interested the author. Visit our Resources page for links to more journals or follow the HealthEconBot. If you’d like to write one of our weekly journal round-ups, get in touch.
Conditional cash transfers: the case of Progresa/Oportunidades. Journal of Economic Literature [RePEc] Published September 2017
The Progresa/Oportunidades programme was instigated in Mexico in 1995. The main innovation of the programme was a series of cash payments conditional on various human capital investments in children, such as regular school attendance and health check-ups. Beginning principally in rural areas, it expanded to urban areas in 2000-1. Excitingly for researchers, randomised implementation of the programme was built into its rollout, permitting evaluation of its effectiveness. Given it was the first such programme in a low- or middle-income country to do this, there has been a considerable amount of analysis and literature published on the topic. This article provides an in-depth review of this literature – incorporating over one hundred articles from economics and health journals. I’ll just focus on the health-related aspects of the review rather than education, labour market, or nutrition outcomes, but they’re also worth a look. The article provides a simple theoretical model about the effects of conditional cash transfers to start with and suggests that they have both a price effect, through reducing the shadow wage of time in activities other than those to which the payment is targeted, and an income effect, by increasing total income. The latter effect is ambiguous in its direction. For health, a large number of outcomes including child mortality and height, behavioural problems, obesity, and depression have all been assessed. For the most part this has been through health modules applied to a subsample of people in surveys, which may limit the conclusions one can make for reasons such as attrition in the samples of treated and control households. Generally, the programme has demonstrated positive health effects (of varying magnitudes) in both the short and medium terms. Health care utilisation increased and with it there was a reduction in self-reported illness, behavioural problems, and obesity. However, positive effects are not reported universally. For example, one study reported an increase in child height in the short term, but in the medium term little change was reported in height-for-age z-scores in another study, which may suggest children catch-up in their growth. Nevertheless, it seems as though the programme succeeded in its aims, although there remains the question of its cost-benefit ratio and whether these ends could have been achieved more cost-effectively by other means. There is also the political question about the paternalism of the programme. While some political issues are covered, such as the perception of the programme as a vehicle for buying votes, and strategies for mitigating these issues, the issue of its acceptability to poor Mexicans is not well covered.
Health‐care quality and information failure: evidence from Nigeria. Health Economics [PubMed] Published 23rd October 2017
When we conceive of health care quality we often think of preventable harm to patients. Higher quality institutions make fewer errors such as incorrect diagnoses, mistakes with medication, or surgical gaffes. However, determining when an error has been made is difficult and quality is often poorly correlated with typical measures of performance like standardised mortality ratios. Evaluating quality is harder still in resource-poor settings where there are no routine data for evaluation and often an absence of patient records. Patients may also have less knowledge about what constitutes quality care. This may provide an environment for low-quality providers to remain in business as patients do not discriminate on the basis of quality. Patient satisfaction is another important aspect of quality, but not necessarily related to more ‘technical’ aspects of quality. For example, a patient may feel that they’ve not had to wait long and been treated respectfully even if they have been, unbeknownst to them, misdiagnosed and given the wrong medication. This article looks at data from Nigeria to examine whether measures of patient satisfaction are correlated with technical quality such as diagnostic accuracy and medicines availability. In brief, they report that there is little variation in patient satisfaction reports, which may be due to some reporting bias, and that diagnostic accuracy was correlated with satisfaction but other markers of quality were not. Importantly though, the measures of technical quality did little to explain the overall variation in patient satisfaction.
State intimate partner violence-related firearm laws and intimate partner homicide rates in the United States, 1991 to 2015. Annals of Internal Medicine [PubMed] Published 17th October 2017
Gun violence in the United States is a major health issue. Other major causes of death and injury attract significant financial investment and policy responses. However, the political nature of firearms in the US limit any such response. Indeed, a 1996 law passed by Congress forbade the CDC “to advocate or promote gun control”, which a succession of CDC directors has interpreted as meaning no federally funded research into gun violence at all. As such, for such a serious cause of death and disability, there is disproportionately little research. This article (not federally funded, of course) examines the impact of gun control legislation on inter-partner violence (IPV). Given the large proportion of inter-partner homicides (IPH) carried out with a gun, persons convicted of IPV felonies and, since 1996, misdemeanours are prohibited from possessing a firearm. However, there is variation in states about whether those convicted of an IPV crime have to surrender a weapon already in their possession. This article examines whether states that enacted ‘relinquishment’ laws that force IPV criminals to surrender their weapons reduced the rate of IPHs. They use state-level panel data and a negative binomial fixed effects model and find that relinquishment laws reduced the risk of IPHs by around 10% and firearm-related IPH by around 15%.
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