Many people in developing countries lack access to health technologies, even basic ones. Why do these problems in access persist? What can be done to improve access to good health technologies, especially for poor people in poor countries?
This book answers those questions by developing a comprehensive analytical framework for access and examining six case studies to explain why some health technologies achieved more access than others. The technologies include praziquantel (for the treatment of schistosomiasis), hepatitis B vaccine, malaria rapid diagnostic tests, vaccine vial monitors for temperature exposure, the Norplant implant contraceptive, and female condoms.
Based on research studies commissioned by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to better understand the development, adoption, and uptake of health technologies in poor countries, the book concludes with specific lessons on strategies to improve access. These lessons will be of keen interest to students of health and development, public health professionals, and health technology developers—all who seek to improve access to health technologies in poor countries.
The most intriguing question about Indonesia’s economic development during the twentieth century is why the country’s growth performance has been so erratic and displayed such a high degree of discontinuity. This is connected with the fundamental question about the nature of long-run economic development in Indonesia.
So far the economic historiography of Indonesia has been less systematic than what the available source material would permit. Indonesia is exceptionally well endowed with rich statistical sources, which carry the potential of supporting a rigorous and systematic quantitative approach to vital questions concerning the economic growth performance in the long run.
This book takes such an approach and presents new estimates for the long-run growth of the Indonesian service sector, and analyses the role of the various service sectors in economic development. Linking empirical and theoretical analysis in a creative fashion, Daan Marks provides a rich and original contribution to our understanding of the economic history of Indonesia. He shows that the service sector has played a crucial role in Indonesia’s economic development. Or in other words, to fully understand Indonesia’s economic development path sevices need to be accounted for.
A Foreign Affairs Best Book of the Year
“An intellectual excursion of a kind rarely offered by modern economics.”
—Foreign Affairs
Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century is the most widely discussed work of economics in recent years. But are its analyses of inequality and economic growth on target? Where should researchers go from there in exploring the ideas Piketty pushed to the forefront of global conversation? A cast of leading economists and other social scientists—including Emmanuel Saez, Branko Milanovic, Laura Tyson, and Michael Spence—tackle these questions in dialogue with Piketty.
“A fantastic introduction to Piketty’s main argument in Capital, and to some of the main criticisms, including doubt that his key equation…showing that returns on capital grow faster than the economy—will hold true in the long run.”
—Nature
“Piketty’s work…laid bare just how ill-equipped our existing frameworks are for understanding, predicting, and changing inequality. This extraordinary collection shows that our most nimble social scientists are responding to the challenge.”
—Justin Wolfers, University of Michigan
After the Berlin Wall tells the inside story of an international financial institution, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), created in the aftermath of communism to help the countries of central and eastern Europe transition towards open market-oriented democratic economies.
The first volume of a history in two parts, After the Berlin Wall charts the EBRD’s life from a fledgling high-risk start-up investing in former socialist countries from 1991 to become an established member of the international financial community, which (as of April 2020) operates in almost 40 countries across three continents.
This volume describes the multilateral negotiations that created this cosmopolitan institution with a ‘European character’ and the emergence of the EBRD’s unique business model: a focus on the private sector and a mission to deliver development impact with sustainable financial returns. The author recounts the challenges that ‘transition’ countries faced in moving from a defunct to a functioning economic system and maps the EBRD’s response to critical events, from the dissolution of the Soviet Union, to the safe confinement of the Chernobyl disaster site, the debt default in Russia and the onset of the global financial crisis in 2008.
A fascinating study that shows how the intersection of technology and politics has shaped South African history since the 1960s.
This book details the development of an interconnected technological system of a coal mine and of the Matimba and Medupi power stations in the Waterberg, a rural region of South Africa near the country’s border with Botswana. South Africa’s state steel manufacturing corporation, Iscor, which has since been privatized, developed a coal mine in the region in the 1970s. This set the stage for the national electricity provider, Eskom, to build coal-fueled power stations in the Waterberg.
Faeeza Ballim follows the development of these technological systems from the late 1960s, a period of heightened repression as the apartheid government attempted to realize its vision of racial segregation, to the deeply fraught construction of the Medupi power station in postapartheid South Africa. The Medupi power station was planned toward the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century as a measure to alleviate the country’s electricity shortage, but the continued delay of its completion and the escalation of its costs meant that it failed to realize those ambitions while public frustration and electricity outages grew.
By tracing this story, this book highlights the importance of technology to our understanding of South African history. This characterization challenges the idea that the technological state corporations were proxies for the apartheid government and highlights that their activities in the Waterberg did not necessarily accord with the government’s strategic purposes. While a part of the broader national modernization project under apartheid, they also set the stage for worker solidarity and trade union organization in the Waterberg and elsewhere in the country. This book also argues that the state corporations, their technology, and their engineers enjoyed ambivalent relationships with the governments of their time, relationships that can be characterized as both autonomous and immersive. In the era of democracy, while Eskom has been caught up in government corruption—a major scourge to the fortunes of South Africa—it has also retained a degree of organizational autonomy and offered a degree of resistance to those who sought to further corruption.
The examination of the workings of these technological systems, and the state corporations responsible for them, complicates conventional understandings of the transition from the authoritarian rule of apartheid to democratic South Africa, which coincided with the transition from state-led development to neoliberalism. This book is an indispensable case study on the workings of industrial and political power in Africa and beyond.
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