1. A) The main finding from the Malaria eradication was that there are a positive correlation between eradication programs and future income/literacy rates. That is individuals that were more exposed to the eradication programs as children went on to earn higher incomes when they were adults and higher literacy rates. Persistent exposure to malaria infection showed income to be that of half of those not persistently exposed to malaria infection. Bleakley used non-malaria regions to serve as control groups to allow controlling for differences over time. Bleakley also found that malaria is more impactful on infants and children while milder on adults. It also had more long-term effects on health and human capital.
B) Difference in differences is a statistical technique used economics, which tries to duplicate an experimental research design using observational study data. It calculates the effect of a treatment on an outcome by comparing the average change in a treatment group to that of a control group. However, this treatment is sometimes subject to bias. The required assumption for this approach to work is that without the program both treatment and comparison groups would have experienced the same level of change.
2. A) They focused on larger scale schools as opposed to individual students in order to later break down the schools into sub groups them selves. It allowed for more proper control and future flexibility.
B) The main result was that the program reduced school absenteeism by one quarter and it was more inexpensive than other measures created to increase school participation. Deworming substantially improved the health of untreated students in both treated and untreated schools; the improvement is large enough to justify full subsidization of the treatment. They find no evidence of a program impact on academic test scored.
4 a) Poor individuals in developing countries tend to spend a lot on single health events (cure) rather than on frequent care (prevention). This suggests that the poor are less risk adverse that the average person when it comes to healthcare. In my opinion I feel the poor are not more risk seeking but rather less educated so they see less value in preventative measures.
There are 4 key hypothesize that help explain the health seeking behavior of poor individuals:
1. Quality of healthcare could be judged by price, which would help explain why free immunizations are rarely. Also many ‘doctors’ in developing countries don’t have proper medical education or training.
2. In developed nations there is high faith and trust in the government’s health system, and the average individual is educated enough to understand the benefits of healthcare.
3. Poor countries often have corruption, which lowers their trust in the public health system. Many people in those countries think why bother.
4. LEDC citizens are less committed to long-run activities that improve healthcare, such as chlorination of water. Important tasks are often postponed since consequences may not persist in the short term.
b) Healthcare systems in developing countries tend to operate with inconsistency in their operations:
1. In Udaipur, the health centres were closed 56% of the time they were supposed to be open.
2. Absenteeism rates of doctors and nurses are extremely high as well, in Udaipur where absenteeism was found to be around 35% in 2006.
3. A report conducted by Das, Hammer and Leonard in 2008 found that public doctors usually treat based on the patient’s self-diagnosis.
Other reasons can be attributed to the minds of the citizens:
1. The hypothesis that free means worthless was disproved by the results from Cohen and Dupas’ experiment, which suggested that the vast majority of people will in fact buy preventative care like bed nets, when they are subsidized or free.
2. A vast majority of the population uses both traditional healers and doctors. The poor will often lack commitment to healthcare since the
