Flat- fee prepayment may be the only feasible cost recovery scheme for primary health care in rural villages of Guinea-Bissau. The level of satisfaction was high in this simple prepayment scheme of drugs and limited primary health care in 18 villages. In a larger health system or an urban area, it might be more difficult to administer such a scheme and to prevent abuse of the system.

This in-depth study of health insurance schemes in Zaire recommends developing more pilot insurance systems in areas where health systems already function - and strengthening existing systems through training, exchange visits, information systems, and technical assistance. Implementing a nationwide health insurance system is not likely to be as successful as decentralized, locally managed plans.

Food aid compensates for up to half the drop in food production during food crises in Sub-Saharan Africa; imports make up another 30 percent. Both stabilize food consumption and neutralize the effects of random shocks to domestic food production.

Sub-Saharan Africa has not joined the global demographic transition. Africa's eventual transition to fertility decline may depend more than it has elsewhere on functional changes in the family and changes in the family structure.

Tariff reform for trade liberalization must be seen as part of a broader program of tax reform. Custom duties on imports should be geared chiefly to protection. Reductions in such duties to promote an outward- oriented development strategy should be offset by increases in sales/value- added taxes applied equally to imports and domestic production. That would maintain public revenues and avoid exacerbating macroeconomic dificulties.

Analyses 82 health insurance schemes in terms of their membership and coverage, financing, administration and fund management, how providers were paid and the mechanisms for providing health care.

Applications of general equilibrium models to different problems arising in tax policy - such as identifying desirable tax bases in Bangladesh, analyzing price controls in China, and coordinating tax- cum- tariff reform in India - show how useful they can be in supplementing more qualitative judgements. But they are useful only if substantial effort is devoted to establishing a consistent data set and to choosing the structure of the model in a way that makes its behavior consistent with what good economic analysis would suggest.

How the CMEA system of international trade affected enterprise incentives and inhibited market-oriented domestic reform in the Eastern European socialist economies.