Background: Inequalities in health represent a major problem in many countries, including Indonesia. Addressing health inequality is a central component of the Sustainable Development Goals and a priority of the World Health Organization (WHO). WHO provides technical support for health inequality monitoring among its member states. Following a capacity-building workshop in the WHO South-East Asia Region in 2014, Indonesia expressed interest in incorporating healthinequality monitoring into its national health information system. Objectives: This ...

Income inequality is one of the most profound social, economic, and political challenges of our time. The gap between the rich and the poor has been regarded as a major concern for policy makers. This gap is at its highest level in decades for developed economies, while the inequality trend has been rising in many developing countries. In Asia, despite recent economic growth, income distribution has been worsening as well. This book contributes to the existing literature on inequality in Asia by overviewing the new trend of inequality in Asia and ...

This study considers how education and globalization affect income inequality in Asia, with unbalanced panel data. The evidence supports the validity of Kuznets’ inverted-U hypothesis for the connection between income level and income inequality. However, when more variables are integrated into the model, the consistency of the inverse U-shaped curve becomes weaker. The empirical results suggest that educational variables are highly influential in affecting income distribution. Our analysis indicates that a higher level of education achieved by ...

Background Countdown to 2015 tracks progress towards achievement of Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) 4 and 5, with particular emphasis on within-country inequalities. We assessed how inequalities in maternal, newborn, and child health interventions vary by intervention and country.

This paper was presented in the sixth China-ASEAN Forum on Social Development and Poverty Reduction, which was held on 26-27 September 2012 in Liuzhou, China. The forum was supported under the UNDP-IPRCC project. Southeast Asia and China together constitute nearly half of the total global ethnic minority population. This chapter will address the challenge of the development of ethnic minority groups in the ASEAN region, and China

In India, despite improvements in access to health care, inequalities are related to socioeconomic status, geography, and gender, and are compounded by high out-of-pocket expenditures, with more than three-quarters of the increasing financial burden of health care being met by households. Health-care expenditures exacerbate poverty, with about 39 million additional people falling into poverty every year as a result of such expenditures. We identify key challenges for the achievement of equity in service provision, and equity in financing and ...