Nongovernmental organizations and health delivery in sub-Saharan Africa

This paper attempts to present the distinctive characteristics - both positive and negative - of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) as institutions for providing health care. It reviews the historical role of NGOs as vital contributors to health care delivery in Africa and looks at how the current environment has brought NGOs to the fore. It analyzes the implications of the trend among donors to channel resources to developing countries through NGOs and discusses various policy options governments have employed in relation to NGOs. Finally, it raises some unanswered questions about environments conducive to NGO activity and contributing to roles that NGOs can be encouraged to fulfill without sacrificing their very strength in the development process.Agricultural Knowledge&Information Systems,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Health Systems Development&Reform,Housing&Human Habitats,Regional Rural Development

Traditional medicine in sub-Saharan Africa : its importance and potential policy options

This report indicates that about 20 percent of Africans who seek medical care first consult traditional healers. Patients tend to consult modern health care services for infectious or acute diseases, or those for which modern health care has been shown to be highly effective. But patients tend to consult traditional practitioners for chronic diseases, for diseases related to psychological or social disruption or to reproductive systems, for diseases that are slow to respond to treatment or deemed to be"magical"in origin. The prestige and credibility of traditional healers have been waning in the face of modernization and an increasingly educated public. Even so many highly educated people consult traditional practitioners. A survey in Ibadan of two groups - one educated elite, the other a traditional, less privileged group - found that roughly 70percent of both groups used traditional health care, particularly traditional drugs. The author shows that traditional medicine is an important source of health care for significant number of Africans and that traditional healers, particularly those who wield authority within their communities, are an important human resource for health care.Gender and Health,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Health Systems Development&Reform,Regional Rural Development,Hygiene Promotion and Social Marketing

Nonlinear Minimization Estimators in the Presence of Cointegrating Relations

In this paper, we consider estimation of a long-run and a short-run parameter jointly in the presence of nonlinearities. The theory developed establishes limit behavior of minimization estimators of the long-run and short-run parameters jointly. Typically, if the long-run parameter that is present in a cointegrating relationship is estimated, its estimator will be superconsistent. Therefore, we may conjecture that the joint minimization estimation of both parameters jointly will result in the same limit distribution for the short-run parameter as if the long-run parameter was known. However, we show that unless a regularity condition holds, this intuition is false in general. This regularity condition, that clearly holds in the standard linear case, is identical to the condition for validity of a two-step Granger-Engle type procedure. Also, it is shown that if the cointegrated variables are measured in deviation from their averages, the standard asymptotic normality result (that one would obtain if the long-run parameter was known) holds.

Accounting for Growth in Post-Soviet Russia

In pursuit of its transition from a command to a market economy, post-Soviet Russia has witnessed enormous regional differences in economic growth rates. Moreover, the economic reforms implemented under this transition, while initiated at the federal level, have also differed markedly across regions, as regional governments have had considerable discretion over the implementation of reform policies in their jurisdictions. We exploit these differences in analyzing whether regional differences in reform policies can account for regional differences in growth rates, and conclude that to a considerable degree, they can. Most notably, we find that local-government privatization initiatives and regional-government initiatives to gain control over their capital stock (e.g. plants, equipment, machinery and social infrastructure) exhibit close correspondence with the formation of new legal enterprises, which in turn exhibits close correspondence with economic growth.optimal taxation, tax evasion, organized crime

Dust and ionized gas in elliptical galaxies: Signatures of merging collisions

Traditionally elliptical galaxies were thought to be essentially devoid of interstellar matter. However, recent advances in instrumental sensitivity have caused a renaissance of interest in dust and gas in - or associated with - elliptical galaxies. In particular, the technique of co-adding IRAS survey scans has led to the detection of more than half of all ellipticals with BT less than 11 mag. in the Revised Shapley-Ames catalog, indicating the presence of 10(exp 7) - 10(exp 8) solar mass of cold interstellar matter (Jura et al. 1987). In addition, CCD multi-color surface photometry shows dust patches in about 30 percent of the cases studied to date (e.g., Veron-Cetty & Veron 1988). Thorough study of the gas and dust in ellipticals is important to (1) determine its origin (mass-loss from late-type stars, merging collisions with other galaxies or accretion inflows from cooling X-ray gas), and (2) investigate the 3-D shape of ellipticals, as can be derived from the orientation of the dust lanes and the 2-D velocity field of the gas. An important result of our comprehensive CCD imaging program is that a relevant fraction (approximately 40 percent) of the sample objects exhibits dust patches within extended H-alpha+(NII) line-emitting filaments. This common occurrence can be easily accounted for if the dust and gas have an external origin, i.e., mergers or interactions with gas-rich galaxies. Evidence supporting this suggestion: (1) the ionized gas is usually dynamically decoupled from the stellar velocity field (see, e.g., Sharples et al. 1983, Bertola & Bettoni 1988); (2) it is shown in a companion paper (Goudfrooij et al. 1992) that internal stellar mass loss alone can not account for the dust content of elliptical galaxies

A simple two-component model for the far-infrared emission from galaxies

A simple model was constructed to calculate the far-infrared emission of galaxies made up of a disk component containing cool dust heated by the general interstellar radiation field and of a molecular cloud component containing warm dust heated by recently formed massive stars. This model is fitted to the optical and far-infrared data of 120 Shapley-Ames galaxies and of 20 optically studied mini-survey galaxies, resulting in the determination of blue face-on extinctions and of the total luminosities of recently born massive stars and disk stars. The ratio of these two luminosities is a more reliable star formation activity index than the previously used ratio L sub IR/L sub B. The results show that infrared selected galaxies are on the average almost three times more dusty than optically selected ones. Only about 10% of the mini-survey galaxies exhibits strongly enhanced star formation

Entrepreneurship and Post-Socialist Growth

A growing body of national-level survey evidence indicates that small-scale entrepreneurial activity has been an important engine of growth in post-socialist economies. Here we use a rich regional data set to obtain a statistical characterization of the relationship between entrepreneurial activity and economic growth within post-Soviet Russia. Russia is a useful laboratory for evaluating links between entrepreneurial activity and growth because of the striking variation in initial conditions, the adoption of policy reforms, and entrepreneurial activity observed across its large number of regions in the early stages of transition. Russia has also experienced striking regional variation in subsequent growth. Conditional on variations in initial conditions and policy reform measures, we find that regional entrepreneurial activity exhibits a strong and enduring relationship with subsequent growth.economic transition; small legal enterprises