Parental investment decisions guide parental actions regarding children's productive work and are shaped by ecological context. Urban ecology enhances long-term payoffs to investment in human capital, increasing opportunity costs for work performed by children, and decreased workload should result. Using an embodied capital framework, self-reported data on urban and rural Indo-Fijian children's...

Following an active period of policy development and implementation in the 1990s,1 there have been two national great leaps forward that tackled geographical health inequalities in Australia in the new century. In 2000, in the context of growing disaffection in the rural electorate,2 the then health minister, Michael Wooldridge, was responsible for a federal Budget centrepiece of $562 million, ...

In developing countries, where a majority of families derive their livelihoods from agriculture, sustainable agriculture cannot be discussed in isolation of sustainable rural livelihoods. Sustainable rural livelihood is a multifaceted concept and refers to maintenance or enhancement of access of rural families to food and income-generating activities on a long-term basis. It encompasses secured...

Despite living in the countryside where open space is plentiful and there is often significant agricultural production, rural older adults have higher rates of overweight/obesity, physical inactivity and food insecurity than older adults living in suburban areas. All three conditions are risk factors for heart disease, diabetes and repeated falls. This policy brief examines the health of rural ...

The strategy of providing access to Internet through kiosks for fostering socio-economic growth in rural areas in developing countries is receiving increasing attention. However, results from case studies have shown that context-related factors and inadequate supporting infrastructure tend to limit the potential of such development strategies. We propose an alternative conceptual framework for ...

In a recent participatory cross-sectional study of rural communities in the Northern and Copperbelt Provinces of Zambia undertaken in March 2000, some livelihood analysis revealed that transport constraints, and their impact on rural livelihoods and service provision are of a high priority for the rural poor. Indeed transport emerged as a serious concern in all six study districts, particularly...

BACKGROUND In Thailand, the inequitable distribution of doctors between rural and urban areas has a major impact on access to care for those living in rural communities. The rural medical education programme 'Collaborative Project to Increase Rural Doctors (CPIRD)' was implemented in 1994 with the aim of attracting and retaining rural doctors. This study examined the impact of CPIRD in relation...

This article is a comparison of the characteristics of hospitals serving the general population and Medicaid recipients in California and Michigan, using data from Medicaid uniform claims files and the American Hospital Association Annual Survey for 1984. A greater concentration of discharges in a small number of "high Medicaid volume" urban and rural hospitals in each State was observed for Me...

Research suggests that there is some confusion among quality improvement managers about the differences between quality management and traditional quality assurance. This lack of understanding would appear to be the same among rural and urban health staff, although there is a higher percentage of staff engaged in multidisciplinary activities in the rural health services. Education of staff and ...

This paper, derived from The role and function of the rural nurse in Australia study, describes the effects of organisational change upon the rural nurses participating in the study. It appears that whilst change is an inevitable and regular feature of rural health service delivery, it does not necessarily benefit rural nurses or communities for reasons unique to rural life. Nurses in the study...