BACKGROUND Even though Africa has the highest disease burden compared with other regions, it has the lowest per capita spending on health. In 2007, 27 (51%) out the 53 countries spent less than US$50 per person on health. Almost 30% of the total health expenditure came from governments, 50% from private sources (of which 71% was from out-of-pocket payments by households) and 20% from donors. Th...

BACKGROUND Universal health coverage (UHC) is important in terms of improving access to quality health care while protecting households from the risk of catastrophic health spending and impoverishment. However, progress to UHC has been hampered by the measures to increase mandatory prepaid funds especially in low- and middle-income countries where there are large populations in the informal sec...

This paper exposes the “roadmap” of how modern Islamist terrorism is financed, through both legitimate and illegitimate means: the networks and linkages between financing obtained on the one hand through sympathetic Islamic governments, Islamic charities and banks, seemingly legitimate businesses operating as fronts, and on the other hand through criminal activities running the full gamut from ...

In this paper we investigate the interplay between operations and financial decisions within the context of a two-echelon supply chain. A retailer purchases a single product from a supplier and afterwards sells it in the retail market to a random demand. The retailer, however, is budget-constrained and is therefore limited in the number of units that he may purchase from the supplier. We invest...

Using a large firm-level panel dataset from the Chinese National Bureau of Statistics, we examine the effect of financial distortions on FDI inflows in China’s labor-intensive industries. Following Whited and Wu (2006), we estimate the investment Euler equation and construct a financing constraint index for each firm. We find that among domestic firms, the financing constraint index is highest ...

There is growing belief that countries with better financing environments are associated with higher economic growth because they facilitate entrepreneurship and hence the Schumpeterian process of 'creative destruction'. This dissertation explores this hypothesis in more detail by understanding how the financing environment for new ventures impacts outcomes such as individuals' decision to beco...

Uzbekistan inherited a hospital-based health system from the Soviet Union. We explore the health system-related challenges faced during the scale-up of ambulatory (outpatient) treatment for drug-susceptible and drug-resistant tuberculosis (TB) in Karakalpakstan in Uzbekistan. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with key informants of the TB services, the ministries of health and finance, ...

Small and Medium enterprises act as catalysts in the economic development of the developed and developing countries. Developing countries like Nigeria that require sustained economic growth in their economies must pay attention to the SME sector and harness the great potential to generate employment, improved local technology, output diversification, developed indigenous entrepreneurship and fo...

OBJECTIVE To analyze variation in tonsillectomy procedure rates between health care system types around the world. STUDY DESIGN International database analysis. METHODS The 2015 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Health Statistics surgical procedures database was used to ascertain tonsillectomy procedure volumes for 31 countries. Each country's health system type ...

Firms often cite financing constraints as one of their primary obstacles to investment. Global capital flows, by bringing in scarce capital, may ease host-country firms' financing constraints. However, if incoming foreign investors borrow heavily from domestic banks, multinational firms may exacerbate financing constraints by crowding host-country firms out of domestic capital markets. Combinin...