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Assessing Child Survival Programs in Developing Countries
Testing Lot Quality Assurance Sampling
Joseph J. Valadez
Harvard University Press, 1991

Throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin America public health professionals and paraprofessionals work to control serious, frequent and preventable causes of death and sickness among women and children. Despite international agreement about which health programs to implement and huge investments to support them, avoidable deaths remain high. One reason is the inadequate quality with which programs are implemented.

Assessing Child Survival Programs in Developing Countries provides local health system managers with basic principles for rapid precise program monitoring and evaluation in difficult tropical conditions. Joseph Valadez explains how to adapt Lot Quality Assurance Sampling (LQAS) as used in industrial quality control more than half a century ago, to assess health program coverage and technical quality of service providers. He shows that by examining no more than 19 children from a health facility catchment area a manager can judge whether coverage with child survival interventions has reached a minimal level, and how to observe health workers perform a task 6 times to judge their technical competency.

Joseph Valadez demonstrates that quick assessment is not necessarily dirty, and can provide the information needed to enhance child survival throughout the developing world. In that spirit Assessing Child Survival Programs in Developing Countries is a path breaking text book of modern health services research that both practitioners and students will find indispensable and understandable.

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Democracy and Trade Policy in Developing Countries
Bumba Mukherjee
University of Chicago Press, 2016
Since the 1970s, two major trends have emerged among developing countries: the rise of new democracies and the rush to free trade. For some, the confluence of these events suggests that a free-market economy complements a fledgling democracy. Others argue that the two are inherently incompatible and that exposure to economic globalization actually jeopardizes new democracies. Which view is correct? Bumba Mukherjee argues that the reality of how democracy and trade policy unravel in developing countries is more nuanced than either account.

Mukherjee offers the first comprehensive cross-national framework for identifying the specific economic conditions that influence trade policy in developing countries. Laying out the causes of variation in trade policy in four developing or recently developed countries—Brazil, India, Indonesia, and South Africa—he argues persuasively that changing political interactions among parties, party leaders, and the labor market are often key to trade policy outcome. For instance, if workers are in a position to benefit from opening up to trade, party leaders in turn support trade reforms by decreasing tariffs and other trade barriers.

At a time when discussions about the stability of new democracies are at the forefront, Democracy and Trade Policy in Developing Countries provides invaluable insight into the conditions needed for a democracy to survive in the developing world in the context of globalization.
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Democracy, Electoral Systems, and Judicial Empowerment in Developing Countries
Vineeta Yadav and Bumba Mukherjee
University of Michigan Press, 2014
The power granted to the courts, both in a nation’s constitution and in practice, reveals much about the willingness of the legislative and executive branches to accept restraints on their own powers. For this reason, an independent judiciary is considered an indication of a nation’s level of democracy. Vineeta Yadav and Bumba Mukherjee use a data set covering 159 developing countries, along with comparative case studies of Brazil and Indonesia, to identify the political conditions under which de jure independence is established. They find that the willingness of political elites to grant the courts authority to review the actions of the other branches of government depends on the capacity of the legislature and expectations regarding the judiciary’s assertiveness.

Moving next to de facto independence, Yadav and Mukherjee bring together data from 103 democracies in the developing world, complemented by case studies of Brazil, India, and Indonesia. Honing in on the effects of electoral institutions, the authors find that, when faced with short time horizons, governments that operate in personal vote electoral systems are likely to increase de facto judicial independence whereas governments in party-centered systems are likely to reduce it.

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Economic Adjustment and Exchange Rates in Developing Countries
Edited by Sebastian Edwards and Liaquat Ahamed
University of Chicago Press, 1986
In spite of the attention paid exchange rates in recent economic debates on developing countries, relatively few studies have systematically analyzed in detail the various ramifications of exchange rate policy in these countries. In this new volume from the National Bureau of Economic Research, leading economists use rigorous models to tackle various exchange rate issues, while also illuminating policy implications that emerge from their analyses.

The volume, divided into four main sections, addresses: the role of exchange rates in stabilization programs and the adjustment process; the importance of exchange rate policy during liberalization reform in developing countries; exchange rate problems relevant and unique to developing countries, illustrated by case studies; and the problems defining, measuring, and identifying determinants of real exchange rates. Authors of individual papers examine the relation between commercial policies and exchange rates, the role of exchange rate policy in stabilization programs, the effectiveness of devaluations as a policy tool, and the interaction between exchange rate terms of trade an capital flow. This research will not only prove crucial to our understanding of the role of exchange rates in developing countries, but will clearly set the standard for future work in the field.
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Education Policy in Developing Countries
Edited by Paul Glewwe
University of Chicago Press, 2013
Almost any economist will agree that education plays a key role in determining a country’s economic growth and standard of living, but what we know about education policy in developing countries is remarkably incomplete and scattered over decades and across publications. Education Policy in Developing Countries rights this wrong, taking stock of twenty years of research to assess what we actually know—and what we still need to learn—about effective education policy in the places that need it the most.

Surveying many aspects of education—from administrative structures to the availability of health care to parent and student incentives—the contributors synthesize an impressive diversity of data, paying special attention to the gross imbalances in educational achievement that still exist between developed and developing countries. They draw out clear implications for governmental policy at a variety of levels, conscious of economic realities such as budget constraints, and point to crucial areas where future research is needed. Offering a wealth of insights into one of the best investments a nation can make, Education Policy in Developing Countries is an essential contribution to this most urgent field. 
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Ethics for International Medicine
A Practical Guide for Aid Workers in Developing Countries
Anji E. Wall
Dartmouth College Press, 2012
In recent years, international medicine has become a growth industry. International aid organizations, religious organizations, and medical schools all provide opportunities for health care workers to travel to developing countries to provide needed medical care to the world’s poorest citizens. Ethics for International Medicine explores the many challenges faced by these medical aid workers from the West: They serve in settings with limited medical supplies, facilities, and personnel. Their patients speak different languages, have different cultures, and may even have different interpretations of disease. With limited time in which to provide medical care to hundreds of people or more, ethical dilemmas abound, and many health care practitioners, both novice and expert, are unprepared to manage them. This volume uses a series of cases studies to provide medical aid workers with a method for identifying, analyzing, and resolving ethical issues within the context of international medicine. It is an invaluable tool for individuals and health organizations seeking to serve in developing countries throughout the world.
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Getting Good Government
Capacity Building in the Public Sectors of Developing Countries
Merilee S. Grindle
Harvard University Press, 1997

The creation and preservation of capable states is a lengthy, laborious, and multifaceted process, fraught with opportunities for failure and misspent resources. It requires time, commitment, innovative ideas, consensus building, new rules of the game, efficient design and resource allocation in technical assistance, and considerable good luck. By the mid-1990s, the imperative to improve government performance had been added to the development agenda precisely because of greater awareness that neither markets nor democracies could function well--or perhaps function at all--unless governments' efficiency, effectiveness, and responsiveness are improved.

This publication seeks to help understand how governments can be encouraged to perform better and how state capabilities can be developed in ways that allow markets and democracies to flourish. The contributors draw comparative lessons from specific efforts designed to enhance human resource development in the public sector, to strengthen organizations that contribute to the public purpose of government, and to reform the institutions that set the rules for economic and political interaction.

Getting Good Government will be of interest not only to public officials and public management and policy analysts, but also to political scientists and international development specialists.

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The Global Hunger Crisis
Tackling Food Insecurity in Developing Countries
Majda Bne Saad
Pluto Press, 2013

Millions across the world face the daily challenge to find enough food to survive. Hunger is on the rise globally, with more than 1.2 billion people suffering from food insecurity. Rising prices are further restricting food access.

In this deeply informative study, Majda Bne Saad identifies the causes for global hunger embedded in the current global political and economic system and highlights the key challenges facing food deficit countries. She shows how Western countries share the blame for global hunger through their support for subsidies to agricultural production and biofuels, which have created new challenges to food security worldwide.

Bne Saad argues that, as world population rises from 7 billion to 9.2 billion by 2050, there needs to be a ‘second green revolution’ to grow more food. She looks at the factors constraining low-income nations from achieving food security and considers policies which could generate income and enhance individuals' entitlement to food.

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Global Value Chains
Linking Local Producers from Developing Countries to International Markets
Edited by Meine Pieter van Dijk and Jacques Trienekens
Amsterdam University Press, 2012
This book contains seven case studies of global value chains as well as a discussion of the theory behind these chains. Specifically, it examines the impact of global value chains on local upgrading strategies, as well as the role of governments, buyers, donors, and civil society in influencing value chains and the importance of partnerships as mechanisms for value chain upgrading. An impressive group of eminent scholars deliver a thorough examination of this important economic and political phenomenon. 
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Health and Health Care In Developing Countries
Sociological Perspectives
Peter Conrad
Temple University Press, 1993

In this seminal collection of articles on health care in the Third World, sociological perspectives are applied to medical issues in revealing ways. Fourteen essays (all but two of which are original to this volume) examine the social production of health, disease, and systems of care throughout the developing world. The volume covers a range of areas—central Africa, Nigeria, Singapore, Taiwan, Indonesia, Nepal, China, United Arab Emirates, Oman, and Mexico—and a broad scope of topics, from emergency care, the AIDS epidemic, and women's health care, to public health programs and national health care policies.

Contributors address the central question of whether health systems in developing areas should emphasize the role of clinical medicine and individual physicians or community and preventive medical resources. The major health problems faced by these societies—inadequate sanitation, infectious disease, high infant-child mortality, and a lack of family planning—indicate the greater need for health educators and public health workers despite many poor nations' desire for Western doctors. Other topics that are examined include the process of seeking medical aid; the relationship between traditional and modern medicines; medical education, hospital care, and communication between doctors and patients in developing countries; and the relevance and application of sociology in Third World settings.

This volume seeks to draw attention to the significance of medical sociology for understanding Third World health problems and to show how examining developing societies may necessitate reframing or modifying some Western sociological notions. In addition, these essays stretch the boundaries of medical sociology to include Third World issues.

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Health Sector Reform in Developing Countries
Making Health Development Sustainable
Peter Berman
Harvard University Press, 1995

In Mexico City or Nairobi or Manila, a young girl in one part of the city is near death with measles, while, not far away, an elderly man awaits transplantation of a new kidney. How is one denied a cheap, simple, and effective remedy while another can command the most advanced technology medicine can offer? Can countries like Mexico, Kenya, or the Philippines, with limited funds and medical resources, find an affordable, effective, and fair way to balance competing health needs and demands?

Such dilemmas are the focus of this insightful book in which leading international researchers bring together the latest thinking on how developing countries can reform health care. The choices these poorer countries make today will determine the pace of health improvement for vast numbers of people now and in the future. Exploring new ideas and concepts, as well as the practical experiences of nations in all parts of the world, this volume provides valuable insights and information to both generalists and specialists interested in how health care will look in the world of the twenty-first century.

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Natural Resource Policymaking in Developing Countries
Environment, Economic Growth, and Income Distribution
William L. Ascher and Robert Healy
Duke University Press, 1990
Drawing on case studies developed over a two-year period, 1987–1989, by Fellows in the Program in International Development Policy at Duke University, including experienced representatives from developing countries, the World Bank, and scholars, the authors integrate the growing interest in environmental protection and resource conservation into the existing body of knowledge about the political economy of developing countries.
This book is about the links that tie resource use, environmental quality, and economic development, and the way in which those links are affected by the distribution of income and resource ownership. The links may be relatively simple, as in the case of peasant farmers too poor to conserve resources for the future and with nothing to gain from sound environmental practices. Or they may be very complex—as the authors find when they demonstrate how achievement of higher incomes by the rich can increase environmentally destructive behavior by the poor. Many of the links in some way involve rural land use, whether for agriculture or forestry. Natural Resource Policymaking in Developing Countries argues that the policies that matter are not merely those dealing with resources and the environment, but a much broader set that includes income distribution and asset ownership.
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No Easy Choice
Political Participation in Developing Countries
Samuel P. Huntington and Joan M. Nelson
Harvard University Press, 1976

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The Organization of Space in Developing Countries
E.A. Johnson
Harvard University Press, 1970

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Planning Education Reforms in Developing Countries
The Contigency Approach
Dennis A. Rondinelli, John Middleton, and Adriaan Verspoor
Duke University Press, 1990
This work, the first to apply contingency theory to education reform planning, is particularly useful in that it has applications to planning both in developing countries and in the United States and Europe. The basic approach applies to a wide variety of development programs and will influence project management and policy administration.
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Population and Economic Change in Developing Countries
Edited by Richard A. Easterlin
University of Chicago Press, 1987
"An extremely important book which contains a number of uniformly excellent papers on a variety of topics relating, to various degrees, to the nexus of demographic-economic interrelationships for presently developing countries."—William J. Serow, Southern Economic Journal

"An important landmark in the growing field of economic demography."—Dudley Kirk, Journal of Developing Areas
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The Quality of Education in Developing Countries
C. E. Beeby
Harvard University Press

Advanced countries of the world have taken a hundred years to work out systems of primary education reasonably well adapted to the needs of their communities and to the varied capacities of the children in their schools; today many of the developing countries are trying to do the same thing in a decade. At first sight it might appear that with the help and experience of the developed word they could leap a century and establish straight away something approaching the modern classroom without having to plod through the stage of dreary formalism that marked the first fifty years of our system of compulsory education, in much the same way that many of them have been ushered into the air-age without ever knowing the smoke and dirt of a nineteenth-century railway system.

As Director of Education for New Zealand, with responsibilities also in Western Samoa and in New Zealand's Pacific Islands dependencies, for many years C. E. Beeby had to deal with two educational systems at very different levels of development. He reluctantly comes to the conclusion that new countries cannot simply adopt the systems that have evolved in other nations. He argues that an educational system of high quality must develop in distinct stages through which all systems, at least of a certain type, must pass, and which, though they may be shortened, cannot be skipped. Two main factors determine the stage of development of any primary school system: the level of general education of its teachers, and the length and type of their professional training.

Beeby emphasizes the need for young countries to maintain high educational standards in the face of an explosion of demand for schooling. He comments controversially on the respective roles of the economist and the educator in educational planning and on the need for a truly educational theory of growth to balance the economic theories that have tended to dominate educational planning. In a chapter as significant for developed countries as for emergent ones, he discusses conservatism in education and the peculiar pattern of resistance to change among the teaching profession. Beeby concludes with an examination of the difficulties young nations encounter in attempting to solve some of their problems through the application of new educational technology, and he describes the investigation that must be undertaken before one may assume that the new techniques and media can materially affect educational planning in these countries over the next decade.

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Reforming Economic Systems in Developing Countries
Dwight H. Perkins
Harvard University Press, 1991

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Tax Reform in Developing Countries
Malcolm Gillis, ed.
Duke University Press, 1989
This volume presents the work of experts (in most cases the very advisers who designed and helped implement the reforms) on the tax reform efforts of a dozen developing nations—from the restructuring of the economy of postwar Japan to the 1986 reforms in Jamaica. Among the many lessons learned from these efforts are that tax reform is most successful when tax administration is a central (rather than peripheral) focus of reform efforts, and when tax reform is specifically directed toward economic rather than noneconomic objectives.
Other conclusions include the apparently mutually reinforcing nature of tax simplification and tax rate reduction, and the role of indirect tax reforms (such as the value-added tax) in successful reform undertakings.
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Taxing Agricultural Land in Developing Countries
Richard M. Bird
Harvard University Press, 1974
Agriculture is the largest economic sector in most countries of Latin American, Africa, and Asia, and the taxation of agricultural land is a potentially important instrument in the development policies of such nations. But there is a large gap between theory and practice, a gap that needs explaining. In addition, there have been interesting changes in thought on the role of such taxation in development. Richard M. Bird covers all this in a complete rethinking of the whole subject. His book is a distinguished successor to Haskell P. Wald’s classic study, Taxation of Agricultural Land in Underdeveloped Economics, published by Harvard University Press in 1959. With abundant evidence Bird argues that the tax system of each country, in order to be effective as a part of development policy, must be tailored carefully to peculiar circumstances and objectives of that country.
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Trade and Employment in Developing Countries, Volume 1
Individual Studies
Edited by Anne O. Krueger, Hal B. Lary, Terry Monson, and Narongchai Akrasanee
University of Chicago Press, 1980
This first book of a three-volume study examines the way trade policies in developing countries affect the level and composition of employment. There is special emphasis on the effects of import substitution policies that attempt to make a country self-sufficient by producing local substitutes for imports, as compared with policies that further the expansion of imports.

Ten countries are studied: Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Indonesia, the Ivory Coast, Pakistan, South Korea, Thailand, Tunisia, and Uruguay. The contributors to the volume analyze the link between trade strategies and employment within a common framework, and the analyses of trade policy include the level and structure of protection, the relation of trade policy to labor demand, the labor intensiveness of trade, and the extent of distortions in factor markets and their effects on trade.
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Trade and Employment in Developing Countries, Volume 2
Factor Supply and Substitution
Edited by Anne O. Krueger
University of Chicago Press, 1982
Factor Supply and Substitution, the second in a three-volume study entitled Trade and Employment in Developing Countries, extends the analysis of trade regimes and employment both in depth for single countries and through cross-country analyses. It provides important new evidence of the effects of different trade policies and of the effects of the various factors that make up these policies—exchange rates, wages, social insurance and other taxes, credit, prices, and so on. All six studies reflect a carefully coordinated research strategy that has been carried out by a first-rate team. The researchers combine technical expertise with specialized knowledge of the individual countries.
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Trade and Employment in Developing Countries, Volume 3
Synthesis and Conclusions
Anne O. Krueger
University of Chicago Press, 1988
The NBER project on alternative trade strategies and employment analyzed the extent to which employment and income distribution are affected by the choice of trade strategies and by the interaction of trade policies with domestic policies and market distortions. This book, the third and final volume to come from that project, brings together the theory underlying the trade strategies-employment relation and the empirical evidence emanating from the project.
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