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The literature on women empowerment highlights a positive correlation between work and decision‐making power of women within families. On the contrary, the role of work opportunities in letting women achieve greater control over their lives, making them more independent is also well‐established. In this background, we explore the effect of women employment on different dimensions of women empowerment by using a nationally representative household survey data, the Indian Human Development Survey (IHDS‐II, 2011–12). As "empowerment" is unobservable, multi‐faceted and difficult to quantify, we model it by an index which aggregates the qualitative answers provided by a respondent. Due to the presence of an endogenous relation, we exploit sources of exogenous variations in employment through an instrumental variable (IV) setup. Following the literature, we identify IV as the level of transport infrastructure in the region where a woman resides. We find that the estimated coefficients are positive and statistically significant, remaining robust to changes in empowerment calculation. In the context of public initiatives aimed at improving female labour force participation and empowering women in India, our results show how policymakers can look beyond standard policies and take the help of transport‐related initiatives to improve employment and empowerment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Preventive healthcare behavior (PHB) refers to actions taken by consumers to avert possible incidences of lifestyle diseases. Over the years, diverse approaches have been used to comprehend the complex nature of PHB. This paper follows a three‐step process to examine work done in the PHB domain. At the outset, past literature was examined. This review included PHB models and frameworks, followed by a root‐cause analysis to identify factors that impacted PHB adoption. A systematic literature review (SLR) using a domain‐based hybrid review approach was the study's third and most crucial part. The SPAR‐4‐SLR (scientific procedures and rationales for systematic literature reviews) protocol was used to conduct the hybrid review, involving two separate review studies. In the first study, a bibliometric analysis was carried out, wherein a trend analysis was conducted on an initial pool of 1011 primary peer‐reviewed publications (1998–2023). The trend analysis was followed by a co‐citation network analysis of 39,608 secondary articles, which validated the importance of primary articles as indicated by the co‐citations in these secondary articles. Further, a purification process based on reliability, validity, and replicability criteria resulted in a final pool of 190 relevant articles. These articles were subjected to a thematic analysis. Next, a framework‐based review based on the theories, contexts, characteristics, and methods (TCCM) framework was conducted on the 190 articles. This step validated the primary study findings. Additionally, it examined and reported the underlying theories, context (country level), characteristics, and methods adopted by previous PHB studies. This analysis helps in indicating the future research agenda regarding PHB. Furthermore, the inferences drawn from the two studies were used to propose a conceptual framework for understanding consumers' PHB decisions based on the antecedents, decisions, and outcomes (ADO) framework. The framework posits that specific personal, demographic, cultural, social and socioeconomic factors are precursors to PHB adoption. This PHB adoption, in turn, has positive outcomes such as enhanced quality of life, consumer wellbeing, health promotion, health behavior change, and planning. The comprehensive review and proposed framework will significantly help advance knowledge about PHB. Apart from contributing to the academic literature, learnings from this study hold value for practitioners at the global level for designing actionable strategies for preventive healthcare products and services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The effect of trade on different economic outcomes has been extensively studied but the literature on the specific effects of trade on health outcomes has remained relatively scanty. Our paper fills in the gap by examining the long‐run association between import expenditures on health products and longevity in a cross‐country panel setting of 32 developed and 24 developing countries, covering 1990–2018. It accounts for both time‐series properties and cross‐country heterogeneity, while remaining robust to omitted variables and endogeneity problems, by applying panel cointegration techniques. The results reveal that per capita medical import expenditure on pharmaceuticals, aggregate medical products and medicines have contributed around 0.34, 0.35 and 0.30 percentage points, respectively to the annual increase in life expectancy for an average country in our sample. The findings suggest that higher per capita import expenditure on health products can increase longevity significantly in the long‐run. The results remain robust to cross‐sectional dependence, sub‐samples of developed and developing countries and alternate measures of health outcomes such as adult mortality rates. These findings set the context for treating health product imports as critical for long‐term improvements in population health and outlines the need for greater coordination between health and trade policymakers for improving population health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Positive externalities of education on health have been widely studied in the prior literature. However, the focus has been on the count of years of schooling rather than the levels of schooling, which is a commonly overlooked yet meaningful way of assessing the education – health relationship. Further, the role of health beliefs in determining the relation between education and health has been understudied, particularly for women. We address these two important questions by using a large‐scale household survey data from India. We find that education levels have differential impact on health beliefs and the impact is highest for individuals with higher levels of education. These findings indicate how educational interventions at lower levels can be effective in improving health beliefs to encourage appropriate health behaviour from early stages of life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most studies pertaining to the returns to education literature focus on estimating benefits of education that accrue to the individual who spends more years in school. However, from a public policy perspective it is crucial to understand the gains of education to the society at large. This study is an attempt to estimate these social returns to education, that is, the impact of an increase in average education on individual health outcomes. In particular, we try to assess if (above and beyond individual educational attainment), average years of schooling at a district level has an impact on individual health. We obtain individual level data from two rounds of the India Human Development Survey (IHDS) and calculate district level average education using data from the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) surveys for the same years. We use a logit model to estimate the probability of suffering from short-term morbidity and find that there is a strong negative association between short-term morbidity and average education. We also study the impact of average education on health seeking outcomes such as consumption of cigarettes and tobacco. We find that after accounting for individual education and income, the average education at the district level has a strong positive influence on better health seeking behaviour. The results from our study lend support to the notion that in addition to policies aimed at improving healthcare, an increase in average education can potentially lead to improvement in health outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]