ABSTRACT. This study using an empirical analysis to examine the impact of foreign remittances along with some other variables (foreign aid, debt, human capital, inflation and income) on poverty alleviation in 39 countries including the lower middle, upper middle and high income countries. The study uses the data covering the period of 1990-2014 and the method of Panel fully modified OLS (FMOLS). The FMOLS estimates reveal that increase in income leads to decrease in poverty. Foreign remittances are found to have positive impact on poverty alleviation and statistically significant only for upper middle income countries. The impacts of aid and debt on poverty are found to be positive, indicating both factors contribute positively to poverty expansion. In the same vein, the results exhibit no visible evidence that foreign aid has an effective apparatus for the poverty mitigation. Thus, policy-makers need to devise an appropriate policy to rationalize dependency on foreign aid and mitigate poverty largely by encouraging remittances inflows.

In a bid to improve efficiency in health care, the Ministry of Health (MoH) in Malaysia has been implementing various health sector reforms such as expansion and upgrading of public health facilities. Even though efficiency study is vital for health care institution in monitoring performance, to date no study has been undertaken to measure technical and scale efficiencies of public hospitals in Kedah specifically. The objectives of this study are to measure technical and scale efficiencies among district public hospitals in the state of Kedah, Malaysia. Data envelopment analysis (DEA) technique was used in estimating the efficiency score of these hospitals. Data were obtained from nine public hospitals in Kedah for three years from 2008 to 2010. The DEA technique was used on pooled data which consists of 27 decision-making units (DMUs). The input data comprised the number of doctors, nurses and beds while the number of outpatients, inpatients, surgeries and deliveries performed represented the outputs. Of 27 DMUs, 74 per cent were technically efficient which lied on the best-practice frontier. The technical efficiency (TE) score of technical-inefficient hospitals ranged between 0.780 and 0.991 with the average of 0.935 while the score of scale-inefficient hospitals was between 0.832 and 0.992. The average score of 16 scale-inefficient DMUs was 0.938 which implies that, on average, these DMUs were able to reduce 6.25 per cent of their resources while maintaining the same number of output.

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Determining factors that affect healthcare utilization by the elderly is vital for the health system to be more responsive in providing care to this vulnerable group. The main objective of this paper is to identify the effect of the predisposing, enabling, and need factors on doctor visits and in-patient care for the elderly residing in the northern region of Malaysia. A multistage cluster sampling was used in selecting the sample for the study. A total of 1414 respondents aged 60 and over were interviewed face-to-face using a structured questionnaire. A probit model was used in estimating the utilization equations. At a significance level of 0.05, except for age, all predisposing and enabling factors were not statistically significant in affecting the doctor visits. On the other hand, being a male, smoker, medical insurance holder or had not actively involved in social interaction within the reference period increases the likelihood of being in-patient. Health-related variables remain the most significant factors that determine healthcare utilization, including both doctor visits and in-patient stays, in the area of study, which suggests that government policies to improve population health may influence the level of healthcare use in the future.

This study investigates the effects of the HIV and AIDS epidemic on economic growth in 42 sub-Saharan African countries using data spanning from 1990-2013. Unlike previous studies, we use a longer data horizon and take the time lag effect of the epidemic's incubation period that is, after it might have developed to AIDS into consideration in our estimations. We estimated an empirical growth equation within an augmented Solow model and applied the dynamic system GMM estimator. The results suggest that current HIV prevalence rateassociated with rising morbidity, has a negative effect on GDP per capita growth, conversely AIDS -associated with higher mortality in addition to morbidity, increases per capita GDP growth.