Abdo S Yazbeck

• Ph.D. in Economics
• Economist at World Bank, Retired

For over 50 years, health systems the world over have failed people with type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM). The WHO documents a quadrupling of people with diabetes in a 34-year period to 422 million in 2014, the overwhelming majority of whom were T2DM. This happened despite extensive scientific literature on the causes of, as well as proven treatment...

Despite limited evidence of successful development and implementation of contributory health insurance and low and middle income countries, many countries are in the process implementing such schemes. This commentary summarizes all available evidence on the limitations of contributory health insurance including the lack of good theoretical underpin...

The last 20 years have seen a substantial growth in research on the extent to which health sector reforms are pro-poor or pro-rich. What has been missing is knowledge synthesis work to derive operational lessons from the empirical research. This article fills the gap for the most popular form of health financing reform, health insurance. Based on p...

Despite an unprecedented increase in official development assistance to health in the last 25 years, there is no systematic way to assess dominant patterns in health-system challenges and opportunities in developing countries. Developing a new global instrument for and by donors and development partners would be resource-intensive and cumbersome. I...

Some of Adam Wagstsaff’s colleagues and research collaborators submitted short reflections about the different ways Adam made a difference through his amazing research output to health equity and health systems as well as a leader and mentor. The Guest Editors of this Special Issue selected a set of six essays related to dimensions of Adam’s contri...

An increasing interest in initiating and expanding social health insurance through labor taxes in low- and low-middle-income countries goes against available empirical evidence. This article builds on existing recommendations by leading health financing experts and summarizes recent research that makes the case against labor-tax financing of health...

This paper presents the rationale and motivation for countries and the global development community to tackle a critical set of functions in the health sector that appear to be under-prioritized and underfunded. The recent eruptions of Ebola outbreaks in Africa and other communicable diseases like Zika and SARS elsewhere led scientific and medical...

This paper presents the economic rationale for treating Common Goods for Health (CGH) as priorities for public intervention. We use the concept of market failure as a central argument for identifying CGH and apply cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) as a normative tool to prioritize CGH interventions in public finance decisions. We show that CGH are...

The road to Universal Health Coverage (UHC) needs not be driven by big reforms that include the initiation of health insurance, provider-funder separation, results-based financing, or other large health sector reforms advocated in many countries in sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere. The Seychelles experience, documented through a series of analytica...

This special issue of Health Systems & Reform presents a series of commentaries and articles that reflect the work of the Health Finance and Governance (HFG) project, a global flagship health project of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Over its six-year life, the $200 million project has worked with more than 40 partn...

The characteristics of tuberculosis – such as links to poverty, importance of patient actions, and prevalence of multi-sectoral drivers – require more from health systems than traditional, medically oriented interventions. To combat TB successfully health systems must also address social risk factors and behavior change in a multi-sector response....

Due to their shared history under the Soviet Union and similar health systems, countries in the Central Asia Region offer an important opportunity for the analysis of health system reforms. Building on extensive documentation of health reforms in the region, this article draws on information from a key informant virtual focus group and uses a syste...

—Health systems are not easy to benchmark, in part because the health sector produces more than one outcome. This article offers two ways of benchmarking the health systems of countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) focusing on two different outcomes, health status and financial protection. The first approach is by measuring the gap be...

In 1999, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia enacted a law that compels private employers to covernon-Saudi employees with health insurance. In the 16 years that followed, the health sector inthe Kingdom has seen a dramatic shift in how services are provided and paid for, and the changecontinues at an accelerated speed. Based on interviews with 12 large pr...

In 2016, the Flagship Program for improving health systems performance and equity, a partnership for leadership development between the World Bank and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and other institutions, celebrates 20 years of achievement. Set up at a time when development assistance for health was growing exponentially, the Flagsh...

The demographic dividend describes the interplay between changes in a population’s age structure due to the demographic transition and rapid economic growth. Except for a few countries in Southern Africa and some island nations, fertility rates and youth dependency rates in Sub-Saharan Africa are among the highest in the world, exposing the region...

How do economic downturns affect the health sector? And what can health policy makers do to respond to the challenges posed by volatile economies? Learning from Economic Downturns: How to Better Assess, Track, and Mitigate the Impact on the Health Sector addresses these and other questions. It proposes a more effective role for the health sector in...

While women in developing countries continue to die in large numbers in child birth, Population and Reproductive Health specialists and advocates around the world are struggling to keep the policy agenda focused on the rights and needs of poor women. The 1994 Cairo Conference and Program of Action changed how we do business, and opened many doors,...

Previously published evidence from the 1992-1993 Indian National Family and Health Survey (NFHS) on the state of childhood immunization showed the importance of analyzing immunization outcomes beyond national averages. Reported total system failure (no immunization for all) in some low performance areas suggested that improvements in immunization l...

Book

Ten years ofter the International Conference on Population and Development finds the reproductive health community under threat from at least three sources: global initiatives, reforms of the health sector, and new financial modalities from donors and lenders. These challenges, however, mainly reflect the complete system failure in many low-income...

Ten years after the International Conference on Population and Development finds the reproductive health community under threat from at least three sources: global initiatives, reforms of the health sector, and new financial modalities from donors and lenders. These challenges, however, mainly reflect the complete system failure in many low-income...

Recent attention to Millennium Development Goals by the international development community has led to the formation of targets to measure country-level achievements, including achievements on health status indicators such as childhood immunization. Using the example of immunization in India, this paper demonstrates the importance of disaggregating...

South Asia is a region of contrasts, with impressive technological achievements but also more than 40 percent of the world’s poor. These contrasts are evident in the health sector, which demonstrates large variations in health, nutrition, and fertility outcomes. Health Policy Research in South Asia showcases some of the innovative qualitative and q...

Since 1999, the International Monetary Fund and World Bank have required low-income countries soliciting for debt relief and financial support to prepare a Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP). The objective of this study is to arrive at a systematic assessment of the extent to which the first batch of interim PRSPs actually addresses the health...

This report focuses on four areas of the health system in which reforms, and innovations would make the most difference to the future of the Indian health system: oversight, public health service delivery, ambulatory curative care, and inpatient care (together with health insurance). Part 1 of the report contains four chapters that discuss current...

About this series... This series is produced by the Health, Nutrition, and Population Family (HNP) of the World Bank's Human Development Network. The papers in this series aim to provide a vehicle for publishing preliminary and unpolished results on HNP topics to encourage discussion and debate. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expres...

The paper develops and estimates a structural model of household health production that jointly determines the demand for leisure and the demand for consumption for elderly males. The authors use a stochastic dynamic programming framework based on the assumption that an individual maximizes lifetime utility subject to budget and time constraints an...

The authors examine accessibility and the sustainability of quality health care in a rural setting under two alternative cost recovery methods, a fee-for-service method and a type of social financing (risk-sharing) strategy based on an annual tax+fee-for-service. Both methods were accompanied by similar interventions aimed at improving the quality...

PIP Findings are presented from cost recovery pilot tests implemented by the government of Niger, with technical assistance from USAID's Health Financing and Sustainability (HFS) Project, in the primary health care sector in Boboye and Say districts during 1993-94. The tests focused upon the use of free prenatal care for pregnant women. Two differe...

Findings are presented from cost recovery pilot tests implemented by the government of Niger with technical assistance from USAIDs Health Financing and Sustainability (HFS) Project in the primary health care sector in Boboye and Say districts during 1993-94. The tests focused upon the use of free prenatal care for pregnant women. Two different paym...

Racial inequality, particularly between blacks and whites, long has been of major concern in the United States. This inequality may take a number of forms, for example, with regard to schooling, housing, health, employment options, and income. In this paper we estimate how much of the 'observed' racial inequality in age-specific death rates in the...

Overview This session is about equity. It discusses the question of whether scarce government resources that are meant to benefit the poor really benefit the wealthy, leaving the poor without access to any health care at all. It presents a tool called benefit-incidence analysis that looks at where funds come from and where they go in terms of the i...

Abstract This first year PHR Applied Research Review has been developed as part of the process to select activities for the Applied Research component,of the PHR Project. The document,reviews current policy issues in all the core health sector reform areas, which are the concern of the project and relevant to achieving USAID strategic objectives. I...