How large economic stimuli generate individual and aggregate responses is a central question in economics, but has not been studied experimentally. We provided one-time cash transfers of about USD 1000 to over 10,500 poor households across 653 randomized villages in rural Kenya. The implied fiscal shock was over 15 percent of local GDP. We find large impacts on consumption and assets for recipients. Importantly, we document large positive spillovers on non-recipient households and firms, and minimal price inflation. We estimate a local fiscal multiplier ...

Significance We find that global warming has very likely exacerbated global economic inequality, including ∼25% increase in population-weighted between-country inequality over the past half century. This increase results from the impact of warming on annual economic growth, which over the course of decades has accumulated robust and substantial declines in economic output in hotter, poorer countries—and increases in many cooler, wealthier countries—relative to a world without anthropogenic warming. Thus, the global warming caused by ...

This review draws on what is now quite an extensive literature on the deficiencies of health care systems and on the Health Systems Evidence database. However, the poor quality and uneven coverage of evidence on the strengthening of health care systems means that evidence of deficiencies is stronger than evidence of remedies. Moreover, the specific circumstances of individual countries strongly influence both decisions about which approaches might be relevant and their success, so any generalizations made from health systems research in particular ...

The COVID-19 is disproportionally affecting the poor, minorities and a broad range of vulnerable populations, due to its inequitable spread in areas of dense population and limited mitigation capacity due to high prevalence of chronic conditions or poor access to high quality public health and medical care. Moreover, the collateral effects of the pandemic due to the global economic downturn, and social isolation and movement restriction measures, are unequally affecting those in the lowest power strata of societies. To address the challenges to ...

In today's global society, infectious disease outbreaks can spread quickly across the world, fueled by the rapidity with which we travel across borders and continents. Historical accounts of influenza pandemics and contemporary reports on infectious diseases clearly demonstrate that poverty, inequality, and social determinants of health create conditions for the transmission of infectious diseases, and existing health disparities or inequalities can further contribute to unequal burdens of morbidity and mortality. Yet, to date, studies of influenza ...

This section provides a brief summary of the main ways in which health in-equalities are conceptualized, particularly in terms of the indicators used to stratify health. It is by no means a comprehensive account but rather considers the ways in which researchers focusing on the UK have tended to conceptualize health inequalities over the past 30 years and some of the key chalenges to these approaches (critiques which are developed later in this book).

The health of individuals and populations is influenced by many variables. These include genetics and biology, but perhaps more important than these are the social determinants of health. The social, political and economic circumstances in which people live their lives are critical in determining how long they live and with what burden of ill health. These differences are very marked between countries, for example a 15-year-old boy in Lesotho has about a 10% chance of living until the age of 60, compared with a 15-year-old boy in Sweden who has ...

This special issue of the Journal of Human Development and Capabilities focuses on two areas of substantial and growing importance to the human development and capability approach: disability and health. The research on disability, health and the capability approach has been diverse in the topics it covers, and the conceptual frameworks and methodologies it uses, beginning over a decade and a half ago in health (Ruger 1998) and more than a decade ago in disability (Baylies 2002).1 We are pleased to share a set of articles in these two areas. ...