Poverty and food insecurity during COVID-19: Phone-survey evidence from rural and urban Myanmar in 2020.

Myanmar first experienced the COVID-19 crisis as a relatively brief economic shock in early 2020, before the economy was later engulfed by a prolonged surge in COVID-19 cases from September 2020 onwards. To analyze poverty and food security in Myanmar during 2020 we surveyed over 2000 households per month from June-December in urban Yangon and the rural dry zone. By June, households had suffered dramatic increases in poverty, but even steeper increases accompanied the rise in COVID-19 cases from September onwards. Increases in poverty were much larger in urban areas, although poverty was always more prevalent in the rural sample. However, urban households were twice as likely to report food insecurity experiences, suggesting rural populations felt less food insecure throughout the crisis.

Addressing inequalities in medical workforce distribution: evidence from a quasi-experimental study in Brazil.

BACKGROUND: Brazil faces huge health inequality challenges since not all municipalities have access to primary care physicians. The More Doctors Programme (MDP), which started in 2013, was born out of this recognition, providing more than 18 000 doctors in the first few years. However, the programme faced a restructuring at the end of 2018. METHODS: We construct a panel municipality-level data between 2008 and 2017 for 5570 municipalities in Brazil. We employ a difference-in-differences empirical approach, combined with propensity score matching, to study the impacts of the programme on hospitalisations for ambulatory care sensitive conditions and its costs. We explore heterogeneous impacts by age of the patients, type of admissions, and municipalities that were given priority. FINDINGS: The MDP reduced ambulatory admissions by 2.9 per cent (p value <0.10) and the costs by 3.7 per cent (p value <0.01) over the mean. The reduction was driven by infectious gastroenteritis, bacterial pneumonias, asthma, kidney and urinary infections, and pelvic inflammatory disease. The results held on the subsample of municipalities targeted by the programme. By comparing the benefits of the programme from the reduction in the costs of ambulatory admissions to the total financial costs of the MDP, the impacts allowed the government to save at least BRL 27.88 (US$ 6.9 million) between 2014 and 2017. CONCLUSION: Addressing inequalities in the distribution of the medical workforce remains a global challenge. Our results inform the discussion on the current strategy adopted in Brazil to increase access to primary healthcare in underserved areas.