This symposium explores the role of health as an 'economic engine' in the lower Mississippi River Delta region of the United States. The health as an economic engine model proposes that health is an important and perhaps critical determinant of economic growth and development. This model is the reverse of the more commonly considered paradigm in which economic conditions are major determinants ...

This paper applies the pressure-state-response (PSR) model to establish environmental quality indices for 30 administrative regions in China from 2003 to 2011 and employs panel data analysis to study the relationships among the urbanization rate, economic development and environmental change. The results reveal a remarkable inverted-U-shaped relationship between the urbanization rate and change...

The objective of this paper is to analyze certain stylized facts of the Cuban economy. The first is the recent policy by the Cuban government to allow the development of a private sector alongside the state sector. The second is the push towards greater industrialization with the development of the port of Mariel. The third is to explore the effects of a decline in fertility in Cuba on its pros...

The plight of rural people has been highlighted by numerous policy studies and considerable public awareness has been created via the media. Whereas 50% of the population of South Africa is rural, the rural areas contain 72% of those members of the total population who are poor. Compared to their urban counterparts, rural people also have vastly inferior access to basic social services and the ...

* The views expressed are personal and should not be attributed to the World Bank.

The article reassesses the contribution of Sir Arthur Lewis’s 1954 article entitled ‘Economic Development with Unlimited Supplies of Labour’ to our understanding of economic development, and to the establishment of development economics as an academic discipline. It argues that Lewis’s key insight into the structural dualism characterising developing countries mapped out a new and distinctive f...

Along with China’s economic development since the reform and opening up, political participation of Chinese citizens has increased a great deal in a variety of forms. Elections are becoming increasingly formal and substantial and the number of petitions is getting larger and larger, which are institutionalized forms of political participation. In the forms of non-institutionalized political par...

Health research systems in the Eastern Mediterranean Region are not well developed to generate and use knowledge to improve health, reduce inequity and contribute to economic development. This study aimed to provide core data on National Health Research Systems (NHRS) in 10 Eastern Mediterranean countries in order to inform actions to strengthen health research system governance and management....