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Noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) are by far the major cause of death in lower-middle, upper-middle, and high-income countries; by 2015, they will also be the leading cause of death in low-income countries.

It has been more than 20 years since Brazil's 1988 Constitution formally established the Unified Health System (Sistema Unico de Saude, SUS). Building on reforms that started in the 1980s, the SUS represented a significant break with the past, establishing health care as a fundamental right and duty of the state and initiating a process of fundamentally transforming Brazil's health system to achieve this goal. This report aims to answer two main questions. First is have the SUS reforms transformed the health system as envisaged 20 years ago? Second, have the reforms led to improvements with regard to access to services, financial protection, and health outcomes? In addressing these questions, the report revisits ground covered in previous assessments, but also brings to bear additional or more recent data and places Brazil's health system in an international context. The report shows that the health system reforms can be credited with significant achievements. The report points to some promising directions for health system reforms that will allow Brazil to continue building on the achievements made to date. Although it is possible to reach some broad conclusions, there are many gaps and caveats in the story. A secondary aim of the report is to consider how some of these gaps can be filled through improved monitoring of health system performance and future research. The introduction presents a short review of the history of the SUS, describes the core principles that underpinned the reform, and offers a brief description of the evaluation framework used in the report. Chapter two presents findings on the extent to which the SUS reforms have transformed the health system, focusing on delivery, financing, and governance. Chapter three asks whether the reforms have resulted in improved outcomes with regard to access to services, financial protection, quality, health outcomes, and efficiency. The concluding chapter presents the main findings of the study, discusses some policy directions for addressing the current shortcomings, and identifies areas for further research.

The fiscal policy's impact on the real exchange rates is highly controversial in theory and practice but noteworthy for macroeconomic policy. This issue is more pertinent in developing countries with an active fiscal policy or wider fiscal space but is explored less. To our knowledge, the fiscal policy impact on the real exchange rate in India is not documented. Against this backdrop, this study explores this in India involving disaggregated data of government consumption and investment spending and a few related variables like trade openness, private consumption spending, and money supply for the period 1996:1–2023:1. The results corroborate long-run associations of real exchange rate and some combinations of the selected other variables. The real exchange rate dynamics estimated through the cointegrated vector autoregressive model followed by an impulse response analysis have shown that government investment spending causes a real appreciation. In contrast, government and private consumption spending exert pressure to depreciate the real exchange rate. Trade openness is another potent predictor of the real exchange rate. On the other hand, no significant impact of the money supply on the real exchange rate is noticed. The results accentuate effective fiscal allocation may be a policy tool for stabilizing the Indian rupee. The unique findings on the Indian economy may also help understand the fiscal effect of real exchange rates in other developing countries.

Private voluntary health insurance already plays an important role in the health sector of many low and middle income countries.The book reviews the context under which private insurance could contribute to an improvement in the financial sustainability of the health sector, financial protection against the costs of illness, household income.

The development challenges of addressing health problems in low- and middle-income countries are daunting but not insurmountable. There are now known and affordable interventions to deal with many aspects of the HIV/AIDS crisis as well as the continued challenge posed by malaria and other major infectious diseases. Three major development objectives of health insurance in low- and middle income countries are highlighted in this volume: securing sustainable financing for health care providers that serve the health needs of vulnerable populations; providing financial protection against the impoverishing cost of illness; and reducing social exclusion from organized health financing and delivery systems. Private health insurance schemes can address the needs of the poor and other vulnerable populations with appropriate combinations of subsidies, risk pooling, household savings, and user charges. The authors of this book argue in favor of a multipillar approach to health care financing in low- and middle-income countries that combines these instruments in addressing the underlying development objectives described above, while putting a strong emphasis on private voluntary health insurance. In this way, private means can make a significant contribution to public ends.

Expansionary fiscal policy is mired in controversy. Its proponents suggest that during recession, it stimulates investors’ activity and has a stabilizing effect on economic growth. However, its opponents point to the costs associated with the budget deficit and public debt handling. Increased public spending may result in an increase in the interest rates, which may, in turn, hinder private investment and weaken the multiplier effect of public spending. The following study examines how private spending and market interest rates reacted to changes in public spending in Poland. The study has shown that public spending stimulates private spending, which is consistent with the Keynesian model, but it also leads to an increase in market interest rates, which is consistent with the neoclassical model.

To improve economic growth acceleration, the Nigerian government should continue to formulate and implement several policies including exchange rate policy regimes. Exchange rate policy regime of any government could be a fixed exchange rate regime when the price of a country’s currency in terms of another country’s currency is fixed to a value by the monetary authority; it could be a floating regime when the price of a country’s currency in terms of another country’s currency is left to be determined by the forces of demand and supply, while a managed-floating regime is undertaken when there is an element of both fixed and floating regimes. Following the Barro (1990) theoretical framework, this study attempted to assess the effects each exchange rate regime has on the economy through the mechanism of private investment spending. The researcher carefully selected macroeconomic variables that have been considered in the econometric models for empirical analysis of the research study in this dissertation through statistical estimation techniques as guided by Barro (1990) and international studies, specifically that of Sahoo et al., (2012), in this area of study. These variables include GDP as an indicator for economic growth, Private capital, private sector credit, real exchange rate, interest rate, government capital expenditure, trade openness, exchange rate regimes dummies, total employment, and spending on health and education. Specifically, the study set out to empirically quantify the impact of both fixed and floating regimes on private investment spending and in turn, on economic growth in Nigeria.Through this study, the key determinants of private investment spending and economic growth in Nigeria. To achieve the study’s objectives and address the respective research questions, preliminary examinations of the data were conducted through the use of visual and unit root tests and some of the variables were found to be stationary at levels (i.e., I(0)) while some are stationary in their first differences (i.e., I(1)). The study proceeded to estimate both private investment and economic growth models simultaneously using Two-Stage Least Squares (TSLS) method.

Consumption in China is unusually low and has continued to decline as a share of GDP over the past decade. A key policy question is how to reverse this trend, and rebalance growth away from reliance on exports and investment and toward consumption. This paper investigates whether the sizable increase in government social spending in recent years lowered precautionary saving and increased consumption. The main findings are that spending on health, but not education, had an impact on household behavior. The impact, moreover, is large. A one yuan increase in government health spending is associated with a two yuan increase in urban household consumption.