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IDB Health Sector Framework Document

The Inter-American Development Bank's updated “Health Sector Framework Document" was approved in 2021. Bill Savedoff led the team which produced this overview of evidence and strategies for improving healthcare services and population health in Latin America and the Caribbean.

The Case Against Labor-Tax-Financed Social Health Insurance

In "The Case Against Labor-Tax-Financed Social Health Insurance for Low-And Low-Middle-Income Countries," Bill Savedoff and co-authors summarize research into labor-tax financing of social health insurance in low-and low-middle-income countries and explain why such policies are generally a bad idea.

Why do societies ever produce common goods for health?

Why Do Societies Ever Produce Common Goods for Health? is part of a special issue of Health Systems & Reform on societies' need to invest in public health through such activities as regulating pollution, epidemiological surveillance, and taxing harmful products. In this essay, Bill Savedoff acknowledges the obstacles that societies' face in sustaining such investments and asks why they are ever made at all? He argues that analyzing the history of public health investments and the motivations that led societies to invest in the past may help us identify the political strategies that could create, expand and sustain such investments in the future.

Developing New National Data on Social Mobility

In Developing New National Data on Social Mobility, Amy Smith summarizes a National Science Foundation sponsored workshop to consider options for a design for a new national survey on social mobility. The workshop was convened by the Committee on Population and the Committee on National Statistics Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education of the National Research Council. Scientific experts from a variety of social and behavioral disciplines collaborated to plan a new national survey on social mobility that will provide the first definitive evidence on recent and long-term trends in social mobility, with the objectives of coming to an understanding of the substantial advances in the methods and statistics for modeling mobility, in survey methodology and population-based survey experiments, in opportunities to merge administrative and survey data, and in the techniques of measuring race, class, education, and income. The workshop also focused on documenting the state of understanding of the mechanisms through which inequality is generated in the past four decades.