Poster session on Population and development

Financial literacy is the ability to understand finance, where one has the awareness, knowledge and skills to make decisions about savings, investments, borrowings and expenditure in an informed manner. Thus, this present paper, the financial literates refer to those women who have a bank saving account, have knowledge on loan programs in a bank, and have any knowledge of health insurance. It has hypothesized that those financially literates are more likely to utilize various health care services than the non-financial literates especially maternal health. Therefore fore, an attempt has been made to study the financial literacy and their utilization for govt. or private health care services for ANC. Uni-variate, bi-variate analysis and multivariate analysis were done for the study. The Northern region women belonging to the Muslim religion community who are residing in urban areas are more likely to be financially illiterate than those of women from the Southern region from belonging to the Hindus, Christians and other religious group who are residing in an urban areas. Financially literates were more likely to visit any healthcare services than the financially illiterates. Financial illiterates were more likely to utilize government health care while the financial literates tend to use the private health care systems.

This paper aims to track the Millennium Development Goals by districts in India using District Level Household and Facility Survey-3 data. The findings reveal that more than half of the districts are still underneath stern poverty; the districts will very soon achieve universal primary education; primary education has overcome gender disparity in all the districts, but gender disparity in secondary education still exists in most of the districts; coverage of measles vaccination in all the districts is improving; in more than half of the districts occurrence of institutional births is very less; knowledge of HIV/AIDS is wide spread among women, on the contrary low condom use among men is a matter of concern to combat HIV/AIDS, ensuring environmental sustainability in all the districts is a challenging task for India. Achieving the MDGs is a critical challenge for India and it has just five years to translate the goals into reality.

According to the FAO, since 1990-92 the prevalence of world hunger in developing countries has declined from 23.2% (980 million people) to 14.9% (852 million people) in 2010-12. Most of this decline occurred prior to 2006 and the economic crisis and increased food prices have slowed declines since. Future progress is threatened by a recent surge in food prices driven by weather extremes including a weak monsoon in India, and a crop-withering drought and heat wave in the U.S. Corn Belt. And a confluence of long-term population and environmental trends is also undermining world food availability. These trends include increased diversion of grains for biofuels, and for livestock and poultry feed, continuing poverty, climate change leading to increasingly unstable weather, shrinking availability of water, the declining productive capacity of croplands and fisheries, and rapid population growth particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Latin America and Asia have made substantial progress in reaching MDG 1.C, whereas progress has been slow in the Near East and Africa. Both rapid population growth and environmental degredation threaten future progress toward elimination of hunger. Major investment in strengthening both agriculture and family planning is needed.

On 1993, the Government of Puerto Rico had been providing direct healthcare services for almost 50 years. Because of raising costs of healthcare technology, the government officers decided to stop financing direct healthcare services transforming its role to one of an insurer. It has been 18 (2010) years since the approval of the Puerto Rico Healthcare Reform of 1993 and the question still lies in public discussions and on professional meetings; Has the Government achieve all the objectives of the Healthcare Reform of 1993?. This research primary objective was to produce an answer to this unanswered question. DESIGN METHODS: Using case study and comparative analysis that included budget, economic, annual reports, among others a design was produced to achieve an effective assessment of the Puerto Rico Healthcare Reform. RESULTS: Since the government is still a direct provider of healthcare services not only an insurer and has not achieved a reduction of the public healthcare expenditures associated with the healthcare sector the objectives of the Healthcare Reform of 1993 have not ben met. CONCLUSION: After a thorough analysis of the data, it can be concluded that the objectives of the Healthcare Reform of Puerto Rico of 1993 have not been met, thus making this important reform a failure.

Nepal is at a historical period of social, economic and demographic transition. Having multiple transitions at once have provided rooms to explore the experiences that are undergoing on different avenues. This study attempts to explore the relation between gender dynamics and economic growth. Nepal is witnessing historical changes in gender dynamics in the last few decades. These changes are expected to add synergy effect on other socio-economic development. Using time series data for the period of 1990 to 2005, this study investigates to what extent gender equality in life expectancy, education, labour force participation and HDI promote economic growth of Nepal. First, this article calculates the gender equality using the auxiliary of UNDP's HDI calculation methodology in the above mentioned area. Second, this equality index is regressed with lagged differences of GDP per capita growth and the results are analyzed. Although different studies have shown gender inequality in above-mentioned indicators impede economic growth, this study finds no conclusive relationship in case of Nepal. While the gender equality is increasing considerably, economic growth is not yet supported by the increase. In the past 15 years female advantages in life expectancy, education attainment and labour force participation are remarkable.

Using a panel data set for four southern Indian states for the period 1993-94 to 2007-08, the paper empirically examines the important factors determining states’ expenditure on health and observes whether health is a luxury. Double log multiple panel regression equations have been specified for analysis. Feasible generalized least square estimator has been employed to estimate the coefficients with the option of first order panel specific auto-regressions. Per capita aggregate health expenditure and per capita expenditure on medical and public health are alternatively regressed on a set of explanatory variables like per capita GSDP, percapita central transfers from centre, infant mortality rate, population and number of primary health centres. The findings suggest that the change in health spending of the southern Indian states seems to have been determined by the states’ resource capacity, availability of resources in terms of central transfers and due to the pressure from demand side factor like rise in infant mortality rate. The health is not luxury in Indian context, as the income elasticity of aggregate health expenditure is found to be 0.697. The paper calls for strengthening states’ resource capacity, reprioritising budgetary allocation and more specific purpose central grants for increasing states spending on health .

Willingness to pay data are rarely collected or used as part of designing health insurance schemes in developing countries. The objective of this study was to assess household heads’ willingness to pay for community health insurance and its determinants in rural communities in Nigeria.
It was a descriptive cross-sectional study carried out among household heads in rural communities. Sample size of 360 was determined using Fishers formula and multistage sampling technique was used to select respondents. Semi structured interviewer administered questionnaire was used and data analysis was done using Epi-info version 3.4.1. Frequency tables and cross-tabulations were generated with a p-value pre-determined at less than 0.05.
The mean Willingness to Pay was 522.0 + 266.3 Naira and the allowable range for fixing premium is between 250 naira and 1,200 naira. The factors that affect Willingness to pay were age, sex, educational attainment, income, household size, and past health expenditure of household heads.
The amount of premium that should be fixed for Community Health Insurance in these rural communities should range between 250 naira to 1,200 Naira and a mechanism should be worked out such that there will be differential payment based on the age, sex, educational attainment, income, and household size in the registration.

Micro-credit has been considered as an economic and social mechanism for poverty alleviation in Bangladesh. It is necessary to evaluate the performance of the micro-credit programs of different NGOs/MFIs in alleviating the poverty situation in Bangladesh. The present study considered six leading NGOs namely Grameen Bank, BRAC, ASA, CARE international, PROSHIKA and TMSS for in-depth analysis. A total 406 credit receivers were selected randomly for the study. Two-level random intercept binary logistic regression analysis and multinomial logistic regression analysis were used to identify the determinants of change in poverty situation. Alongside the perceived change in poverty situation this study devised a mechanism to estimate the actual change in poverty situation based on the changes in wealth and education levels of the households. The study revealed that 76.1 percent respondents could change their poverty situation (perceive change in poverty situation). About 50.5 percent respondents safely overcame the poverty situation (estimated change in poverty situation). The contributing factors for change in poverty situation were amount of loan, different NGOs, satisfaction level, taken loan before and main means of asset change. Significant community level variation was found. Finally, this study recommended some policies.

This study presents deprivation in Brazil in a multidimensional perspective with dimensions related to household’s objective information, assets in the household and subjective evaluation concerning the dwelling. It was observed that households with similar income faced different levels of deprivation in many dimensions due to significant differences in household’s expense profiles. In urban areas, households with high levels of food deprivation spend relatively more on household’s rent, taxes and services, indicating that shelter and then food in the household are the very basic needs. Larger relative expenses with food in the household indicated higher levels of deprivation in all other dimensions. In rural areas, low income households could not overcome food deprivation even though they spend higher proportions of their income on this dimension. Moreover, for the other dimensions, larger expenses with food in the household promoted higher levels of deprivation.