Court decisions in the past twenty years such as Southern Burlington County NAACP v. Mount Laurel Associated, as well recent legislation, have made exclusionary zoning laws based on race illegal and have limited, at least in many states, the legality of exclusionary zoning based on income. While there may be a number of reasons for the use of exclusionary or fiscal zoning, an economic rationale...

OBJECTIVES Rapid urbanisation has often meant that public infrastructure has not kept pace with growth leading to urban slums with poor access to water and sanitation and high rates of diarrhoea with greater household costs due to illness. This study sought to determine the monetary cost of diarrhoea to urban slum households in Kaula Bandar slum in Mumbai, India. The study also tested the hypot...

If raising and educating children is a private cost to households, while the availability of skilled labor supply resulting from the households’ fertility and education choices is a public good, then competitive equilibria typically deliver a suboptimal mix of size and skills of the population. In particular, households would underinvest in their children education compared to the optimal level...

OBJECTIVE Access to healthcare is mostly contingent on out-of-pocket spending (OOPS) by health seekers, particularly in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). This would require many LMICs to raise enough funds to achieve universal health insurance coverage. But, are individuals or households willing to pay for health insurance, and how much? What factors positively affect WTP for health ins...

BACKGROUND User fees are a known common barrier to using health services, particularly among the poor. When fees are present, many facilities have waiver systems for poor patients to exempt them from paying. Targeting waivers to patients who need them most has been a challenge, especially in fragile states, where relevant data are limited and trust in institutions is low. METHODS Community-ba...

BACKGROUND & OBJECTIVES Income inequality is associated with poor health. Inequities exist in service utilization and financing for health care. Health care costs push high number of households into poverty in India. We undertook this study to ascertain inequities in health status, service utilization and out-of-pocket (OOP) health expenditures in two States in north India namely, Haryana and P...

Notwithstanding the great improvements in medical technology , such as oral rehydration therapy, diarrhoea is still one of the leading causes of childhood morbidity and mortality in Nepal. Although easy-to-implement medical technologies help to reduce the health burden of many diseases, the experience in Nepal indicates that how a health system works in terms of fair distribution of such techno...

Findings from a participatory study (with 936 households in 72 villages in Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe) of how smallholders responded to the 1992 drought, and how they were (arguably) largely responsible for preventing the drought developing into a famine, are summarised below under seven headings. These are followed by a summary of two particular implications these findings may have for policy...

Health care finance in developing and low income countries is still predominantly based on out-of-pocket (OOP) payments, and the lack of prepayment mechanisms like insurance. In the absence of insurance, an illness not only reduces welfare directly, it also increases the risk of impoverishment due to high treatment expenditures. It is now widely acknowledged that health care expenditures can dr...