Health Systems Research at the World Bank

The World Bank produces a large quantity of research on health systems in the form of books, papers, studies and toolkits. In preparation for the First Global Symposium on Health Systems Research we decided to see how many pieces of research were produced by the World Bank from 2000 to 2010. To our surprise we found over 600 documents. Links to nearly all of them can be found in this downloadable Database. We are als o working on a paper summarizing this work. An  Interim Draft Synopsis of Health Systems Research Across the World Bank Group from 2000 to 2010 is available here for review and comments.

A few examples of the type of research we found are below.

Reaching the Poor with Health, Nutrition, and Population Services: What works, What doesn't and Why edited by Gwatkin, Wagstaff, and Yazbeck 
Reaching the Poor with Health, Nutrition, and Population Services makes it clear that the health services supported by governments and agencies like the World Bank too often fail to reach the disadvantaged groups who need them most. Studies presented in this report point to numerous strategies that can help health programs reach the poor much more effectively than at present. In doing so, they strongly reinforce the messages of the 2004 World Development Report and other publications about the importance and possibility of making services work better for poor people.  

Beyond Survival: Protecting Households from Health Shocks in Latin America By Baeza and Packard
Beyond Survival encourages policy makers to look at both financial protection and health outcomes when setting priorities for their health systems. The book reviews evidence on mechanisms and magnitude of the impoverishing effect of health events and the public policy options for preventing such impoverishment. This is particularly important given that health shocks are one of the most frequent reasons for households in the lower-income quintiles, that are not already poor, to fall into poverty as a consequence of both high out-of-pocket expenditures and lost income.

Incentives and dynamics in the Ethiopian health worker labor market by Jack, De Laat, Hanson, and Soucat 
This paper presents evidence from a new survey of Ethiopian health workers on such fundamental questions, such as: (i) how do compensation levels vary with location, training, experience etc.?; (ii) what kinds of incentive packages are potentially most effective in attracting workers to underserved rural areas?; (iii) what can we learn about the health worker labor market when new graduates are assigned to their first jobs via a lottery? 

 World Bank Research on Health Systems and other Health topics can be found on the HNP Publications Page. World Bank research on all kinds of topics can be found on the World Bank's main Publications page.