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Ebola is a highly infectious and often fatal zoonotic disease endemic to West and Central Africa. Local outbreaks of the disease are common, but the largest recorded Ebola epidemic originated in Guinea in December 2013, spreading to Liberia, and Sierra Leone in the following year and lasting until April 2016. The epidemic presented a serious challenge to local healthcare systems and foreign aid agencies: it degraded services, caused the loss of healthcare professionals, disrupted the economy, and reduced trust in modern healthcare. This study aims to estimate the extent to which variation in one long-term measure of the quality of local healthcare (the child vaccination rate) is a consequence of local variation in the intensity of the epidemic. Applying a "difference-in-differences" model to household survey data from before and after the epidemic, we show that in 2018–2019, overall rates of vaccination for BCG, DPT, measles, and polio are lower in Guinean and Sierra Leonean districts that had a relatively high incidence of Ebola; statistical analysis indicates that this is a causal effect. The effects of the epidemic on access to healthcare have been local effects, at least in part. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though education is essentially an individual attribute, its positive externality goes beyond the individual to household conditioned by its gendered and generational features. Further, distributional aspects of education levels among the household members are also important in terms of its effects on its welfare outcomes. Hence, education of the head or highest educational level within the household may not adequately represent the household educational levels. In this context, we construct a household educational index that combines three aspects: distribution of education among household members, highest education level among the male and female members and difference in highest education level attained between generations. The generalised final index is found to satisfy all the axioms or the intuitive properties: monotonicity, anonymity, normalisation and uniformity. Additionally, we examine the values of the proposed indicators against the commonly used indicators including education of the household head and the highest education within the household using a representative survey from India. The empirical results indicate considerable difference between the proposed indicator and these common indicators. We also observe a strong association between our proposed indicator and welfare indicators like learning outcomes among children and having a toilet in the household. This implies usage of common indicators may underestimate the significance of education in terms of its bearing on welfare outcomes. These findings lay emphasis on the significance of conceptualizing a household educational indicator that accommodates the complexities of welfare externalities of individual educational levels within the household. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Against the backdrop of the general absence of social benefits (for the elderly) and growing nuclearization of families, we examine the changes in determinants of wage labor participation and supply of the elderly (60 years and above) over the last two decades in India. We use national level Employment-Unemployment Surveys (1993-94 and 2009-10) and Probit as well as Heckman sample selection models for the estimation. Findings show that the negative association between wage labor participation and the age of the elderly has weakened during the study period indicating that the extent of decrease in wage labor participation due to increase in age of the elderly has come down during 1993-2010. Findings also indicate that the elders from poorer and weaker sections have higher compulsion for labor participation in both rural and urban areas and more so in 2009-10. Further, we find that the elders from smaller households (with 4 or less members) are more likely to participate in wage labor in rural as well as urban areas. Moreover, we find that the elders from the poorer sections in rural areas are compelled to work for higher number of days in a week in comparison to the richer elders and this relationship has become stronger in 2009-10. The findings call for a universal pension scheme for improved welfare of the elderly population in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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