“The study begins with some economic theory necessary to model such investments,focusing on a basic, static household production model. In Section 3, the study turns to
measurement issues. In the case of health, in particular, measurement presents some
extremely difficult issues; particularly in deciding how to quantify its different
dimensions and to do so without bias. This discussion is followed by an actual example
of an empirical study, in which we draw from our work on investments in child and adult
health in Côte d’Ivoire. That study is prototypical in the literature in that it assumes that public investments are randomly distributed across localities. If they are not, then empirical results can be terribly biased. The issues involved is discussed in systematic programme placement in Section 5, together with a discussion of potential econometric solutions to the problems that are typically encountered. In Section 6 another set of possible solutions is discussed towards the programme placement problem, social experiments, and provide some recent examples to illustrate the associated strengths and weaknesses. Section 7 concludes.”
