This article examines the pattern of popular trust in public and political institutions in Ethiopia. The analysis employs individual-level survey data and uses ordinary least square regression to analyze the relative explanatory power of independent variables for variations in citizens' institutional trust. The results demonstrate that citizens' trust in public institutions varies extensively from one public and political institution to another. This article argues that institutional performance is crucial factor in explaining the source of citizens generalized trust in Ethiopia. This article concluded that citizens' popular trust in Ethiopia is a function of their expectation of the quality of the services offered, as well as their evaluations of government's efforts to provide services in a fair and equitable manner.

Ownership of health insurance policy is a mechanism for protecting an individual family’s financial security. It is also a means for a risk-aversion strategy for the cost of medical care, loss of productivity time during the illness, and in a more serious case death. This study examines the factors that influence the ownership of insurance policies at an individual level using a binary logistic regression model. The data used in this study was taken from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), the fifth wave in 2002 with 3206 respondents of the survey, whereby thirty-nine percent of the respondents happened to have an insurance policy scheme. The outcome of this model indicated that retirement status, household income, years of schooling, and marital status variables were all found to have a statistically (at 95% confidence level) associated with ownership of insurance policy. Contrastingly, the other covariates, namely: age at the time of the survey, race, and gender of the respondents had insignificantly relationship with the ownership of insurance policy.