Over the last decade Ecuador has experienced a strong increase in financial transfers from migrated workers, amounting to 6.4 percent of GDP and 31.5 percent of total exports of goods and services in 2005. This paper investigates how remittances affect human capital investments through relaxing resource constraints and facilitate households in consumption smoothing by reducing vulnerability to economic shocks. In particular, we explore the effects of remittances on school enrolment and child work in Ecuador. Identification relies on instrumental variables, exploiting information on source countries of remittances and regional variation in the availability of bank offices that function as formal channels for sending remittances, reflecting transfer costs. Our results show that remittances increase school enrolment and decrease incidence of child work, especially for girls and in rural areas. We further find that aggregate shocks are associated with increased work activities, while remittances are used to finance education when households are faced with these shocks. This suggests that liquidity constraints and vulnerability to covariate risk are especially relevant in rural areas, as it affects household's investments in human capital of school age children. In this context both child labour and remittances function as coping mechanisms.JEL Classification: I20, J22, O15

Low contract renewal rates have been identified as one of the challenges facing the development of community-based health insurance (CBHI) schemes. This article uses longitudinal household survey data gathered in 2012 and 2013 to examine dropout in the case of Ethiopia's pilot CBHI scheme. We treat dropout as a function of scheme affordability, health status, scheme understanding and quality of care. The scheme saw enrolment increase from 41% 1 year after inception to 48% a year later. An impressive 82% of those who enrolled in the first year renewed their subscriptions, while 25% who had not enrolled joined the scheme. The analysis shows that socioeconomic status, a greater understanding of health insurance and experience with and knowledge of the CBHI scheme are associated with lower dropout rates. While there are concerns about the quality of care and the treatment meted out to the insured by providers, the overall picture is that returns from the scheme are overwhelmingly positive. For the bulk of households, premiums do not seem to be onerous, basic understanding of health insurance is high and almost all those who are currently enrolled signalled their desire to renew contracts.

A first step towards meeting Indonesia's ambition for universal health insurance was made in 2005 with the introduction of the Askeskin programme, a subsidized social health insurance targeted to the informal sector and the poor. This paper investigates targeting and impact of the Askeskin programme using panel data for 8582 households observed in 2005 and 2006, and applying difference-in-differences estimation in combination with propensity score matching. We find that the programme is indeed targeted to the poor and those most vulnerable to catastrophic out-of-pocket health payments. Social health insurance improves access to health care in that it increases utilization of outpatient among the poor, while out-of-pocket spending seems to have increased for Askeskin insured in urban areas.

In June 2011, the Ethiopian government launched a Community-Based Health Insurance scheme. By December 2012, enrollment reached 45.5%. This paper examines uptake. Socioeconomic status does not inhibit uptake and food-insecure households are more likely to enroll. Chronic diseases and self-assessed health status do not induce enrollment, while past expenditure does. A relative novelty is the identification of quality of care. Both the availability of equipment and waiting time to see medical professionals substantially influences enrollment. Focus-groups raise concerns about providers favoring uninsured households. Nevertheless, almost all insured households want to renew and majority of uninsured want to enroll.