Month: December 2019

This blog was first published in Brookings Future Development Blog. The authors are Ipchita Bharali and Indermit Gill. As countries move from low to middle income, they experience big shifts in the composition of public and private spending on health. One reason for the change in financing is the eligibility criteria for concessional development assistance: Foreign aid starts to decrease after countries move into middle income. This is evident from a snapshot of health expenditures across the income spectrum, used to proxy what happens to a country as its per capita income increases. Figure 1 charts health expenditures by source for countries organized from lowest to highest GDP per capita in year 2015; charts for 2000, 2005, and 2010 look similar. The black vertical lines mark the gross national income (GNI)…

My Experience as a Global Health Policy Fellow I have recently finished a two-month global health policy fellowship at the Center for Policy Impact in Global Health (CPIGH). This fellowship program is aimed at mid-career health professionals from CPIGH’s partner countries. As a researcher with the Health Policy Research Group, University of Nigeria, my main research interests are health services; health systems governance and accountability; analysis of health policies, plans and strategies; and getting research evidence into policy and practice. And so, when I discovered that my application for the fellowship at CPIGH was successful, I looked forward to opportunities to deepen my capacity in the field of global health policy and systems, which I hoped would help me to make a more impactful contribution to global heath. Working as…

This blog was first published in Brookings Future Development Blog. The authors are Shu Chen, Wenhui Mao, and Shenglan Tang. China made impressive gains during the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) era. According to the Report on China’s Implementation of the Millennium Development Goals (2000-2015), China’s achievements included the following: “The number of medical technicians and staff per thousand people rose from 3.63 people in 2000 to 5.40 people in 2014, and the number of beds per thousand in medical and health institutions increased from 2.38 in 2000 to 4.77 in 2014. … The under-five child mortality rate dropped from 61.0% in 1991 to 12.0% in 2013; the gap between urban and rural areas in child mortality rate was narrowed from 1:3.4 to 1:2.4; the maternal mortality rate dropped from 88.8 per…