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Informal payments in the health sector of Eastern and Central Asia are emerging as a fundamental aspect of health care financing and a serious impediment to health care reform. These informal payments, made to individuals or institutions in cash or in kind, are nearly always for services that are meant to be covered by the health care system. Such private payments to public personnel have created an informal market for health care , and are a form of corruption. This problem's roots are traced to declining revenues which have not coincided with a reduction in buildings, hospital beds and health personnel. In these circumstances informal payments compensate for lost earnings, and therefore reforms to modernise the region's health systems must compete with individuals' personal revenues. Options for addressing this problem include comprehensive anticorruption policies, downsizing of the public health system, reducing the set of services sibsidised by the state, encouraging cost sharing with those who can afford it, improving accountability, and promoting private alternatives.

Project X CODE introduces a brand new adventure combining systematic synthetic phonics and richer reading, to accelerate the progress of your special needs and struggling readers. It stars the Project X characters, with a new addition to the team - Mini Marvel.

An approach to current societal issues based upon courage, gratitude, forgiveness, and compassion in action to address problems at the root cause.

Despite the developing emphasis in current scholarship on children in Roman culture, there has been relatively little research to date on the role and significance of the youngest children within the family and in society. This volume singles out this youngest age group, the under one-year-olds, in the first comprehensive study of infancy and earliest childhood to encompass the Roman Empire as a whole: integrating social and cultural history with archaeological evidence, funerary remains, material culture, and the iconography of infancy, it explores how the very particular historical circumstances into which Roman children were born affected their lives as well as prevailing attitudes towards them. Examination of these varied strands of evidence, drawn from throughout the Roman world from the fourth century BC to the third century AD, allows the rhetoric about earliest childhood in Roman texts to be more broadly contextualized and reveals the socio-cultural developments that took place in parent-child relationships over this period. Presenting a fresh perspective on archaeological and historical debates, the volume refutes the notion that high infant mortality conditioned Roman parents not to engage in the early life of their children or to view them, or their deaths, with indifference, and concludes that even within the first weeks and months of life Roman children were invested with social and gendered identities and were perceived as having both personhood and value within society.

Low-skilled health promoters posted in rural villages are doing little to improve health or health-seeking behaviors. In a supply-driven system, such workers have too few incentives, too little knowledge, and too little supervision. Results can be improved without increasing costs. Can a supply-driven network of under-skilled rural health promoters make a difference in rural health care? There are few, if any, signs that the current rural health strategy in El Salvador is working, whether the health promoters are government employees or nongovernmental organization (NGO) workers.Lewis, Eskeland, and Traa-Valerezo arrived at this conclusion after conducting interviews and analyzing primary and secondary data. The village-based health promoters lack incentives and supervision, and ultimately have little to offer local communities. NGO workers are more successful than government workers, but neither group performs satisfactorily.Even the rural poor use private services quite intensively, despite the high cost of the services and of getting access to them.Moreover, people seem to seek the services they need. They select self-treatment in 50 percent of illness episodes, with about the same success rate as when they use health providers.Other options should be considered, as results can be improved without increasing costs.This paper - a product of the Human Development Sector Units, Europe and Central Asia Region and Latin America and Caribbean Region; and Public Economics, Development Research Group - is part of a larger effort in the Bank to encourage appropriate policies and programs in the health sector.

The twenty-first century's second decade has been marked by increasingly high-profile cybersecurity vulnerabilities, data breaches, and controversies over policies and practices that affect the privacy of Internet users' data. At a time when the Internet and online services are being used to transfer, process, and store the communications, finances, and even locations of billions of people, Internet users are learning through numerous headlines that the many benefits of a networked and digitized world are paired with some risks. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these challenges have been accompanied by data suggesting that many Americans harbor some mistrust in the privacy and security of the Internet, and that lower levels of trust may lead to reductions in certain online activities. For example, Goldberg et al. (2016) analyzed data from the 2015 Current Population Survey (CPS) Computer and Internet Use Supplement, a large survey of households regularly commissioned by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) and administered by the U.S. Census Bureau, and found “that Internet-using households that expressed various privacy or security concerns or experienced an online breach or harassment were significantly more likely than their peers to report that such concerns led them to refrain from a range of online activities.” After controlling for demographic and other factors correlated with online activities, they find that Internet-using households expressing particular privacy or security concerns or negative experiences were significantly more likely to report that they had declined to conduct related online activities. Those concerned about identity theft were 16 percentage points more likely to have refrained from completing a financial transaction over the Internet, while those who experienced online harassment were 14 percentage points more likely to have chosen not to express a controversial or political viewpoint online. We seek to further understand how perceptions of security and privacy impact online activity by examining changes over time. In its 2017 CPS Supplement, NTIA again included substantially the same questions about what most concerns American Internet users when it comes to online privacy and security risks, whether they have experienced an online security breach or online harassment during the past year, and whether concerns about privacy or security have stopped them from performing a range of different activities. By analyzing any changes over this period, we aim to shed light on whether mistrust or negative experiences related to Internet security or privacy have increased or decreased over time, and whether those trends have led to any corresponding changes in online activity. By employing quantitative analysis, we will learn whether high-profile data breaches and controversies over online privacy were accompanied by changes in online trust or in Internet users reporting they have been affected by cybersecurity incidents. And just as importantly for policymakers, we will examine whether any such changes in perception were associated with changes in online activity levels. At a time when the digital economy is increasingly important to overall economic prosperity in the United States, it is important to ensure that policymakers understand the impacts cybersecurity threats and privacy concerns can have on economic growth and the free exchange of ideas.

The outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in the winter of 2002-03 raised the specter of a new, unknown and uncontrollable infectious disease that spreads quickly and is often fatal. Certain branches of economic activity, notably tourism, felt its impact almost at once, and investor expectations of a safe and controlled investment climate were brought into question. Part of the shock of SARS was the abrupt reversal of a mounting legacy of disease control that had altered societies' expectations from coping with waves of epidemics of smallpox, cholera, and measles, among other diseases, to complacency with the virtual elimination of disease epidemics. This paper analyzes the economic implications of the Great Plague in the fourteenth century, the 1918-19 influenza epidemic, HIV/AIDS and SARS to demonstrate the short- and long-term effects of different kinds of epidemics.