In this month’s Bulletin

Poverty can breed ill-health and illhealth can keep people poor, obviously, but not enough is known about how this works specifically. Adam Wagstaff, lead economist at the World Bank, shows how the existing literature brings to light three points in particular (pp. 97–105). First, publicly financed health care fails to reach the poor in almost all developing countries. Second, inequalities in health reflect inequalities in education, income, housing and other variables at the individual and household level; so efforts to combat health inequalities must deal at the same time with social and economic factors of this kind. Third, too little is known about the impact of policies aimed at mitigating health sector inequalities, and about how health services can reach the poor. The means of filling this gap exist, however: there is abundant information on the extent and causes of inequalities, and there are abundant measurement techniques for interpreting it.