15 results on '"Ban, Radu"'
Search Results
2. Measuring Environmental Exposure to Enteric Pathogens in Low-Income Settings: Review and Recommendations of an Interdisciplinary Working Group
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Goddard, Frederick GB, Ban, Radu, Barr, Dana Boyd, Brown, Joe, Cannon, Jennifer, Colford, John M, Eisenberg, Joseph NS, Ercumen, Ayse, Petach, Helen, Freeman, Matthew C, Levy, Karen, Luby, Stephen P, Moe, Christine, Pickering, Amy J, Sarnat, Jeremy A, Stewart, Jill, Thomas, Evan, Taniuchi, Mami, and Clasen, Thomas
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Foodborne Illness ,Prevention ,Infectious Diseases ,Pediatric ,2.2 Factors relating to the physical environment ,Aetiology ,Infection ,Good Health and Well Being ,Clean Water and Sanitation ,Child ,Child ,Preschool ,Environmental Exposure ,Feces ,Humans ,Hygiene ,Poverty ,Sanitation ,Environmental Sciences - Abstract
Infections with enteric pathogens impose a heavy disease burden, especially among young children in low-income countries. Recent findings from randomized controlled trials of water, sanitation, and hygiene interventions have raised questions about current methods for assessing environmental exposure to enteric pathogens. Approaches for estimating sources and doses of exposure suffer from a number of shortcomings, including reliance on imperfect indicators of fecal contamination instead of actual pathogens and estimating exposure indirectly from imprecise measurements of pathogens in the environment and human interaction therewith. These shortcomings limit the potential for effective surveillance of exposures, identification of important sources and modes of transmission, and evaluation of the effectiveness of interventions. In this review, we summarize current and emerging approaches used to characterize enteric pathogen hazards in different environmental media as well as human interaction with those media (external measures of exposure), and review methods that measure human infection with enteric pathogens as a proxy for past exposure (internal measures of exposure). We draw from lessons learned in other areas of environmental health to highlight how external and internal measures of exposure can be used to more comprehensively assess exposure. We conclude by recommending strategies for advancing enteric pathogen exposure assessments.
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- 2020
3. The implications of three major new trials for the effect of water, sanitation and hygiene on childhood diarrhea and stunting: a consensus statement.
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Cumming, Oliver, Arnold, Benjamin F, Ban, Radu, Clasen, Thomas, Esteves Mills, Joanna, Freeman, Matthew C, Gordon, Bruce, Guiteras, Raymond, Howard, Guy, Hunter, Paul R, Johnston, Richard B, Pickering, Amy J, Prendergast, Andrew J, Prüss-Ustün, Annette, Rosenboom, Jan Willem, Spears, Dean, Sundberg, Shelly, Wolf, Jennyfer, Null, Clair, Luby, Stephen P, Humphrey, Jean H, and Colford, John M
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Humans ,Growth Disorders ,Diarrhea ,Water ,Hygiene ,Sanitation ,Public Health ,Poverty ,Child ,Rural Population ,Randomized Controlled Trials as Topic ,Child Health ,Stunting ,Undernutrition ,Nutrition ,Prevention ,Pediatric ,General & Internal Medicine ,Medical and Health Sciences - Abstract
BackgroundThree large new trials of unprecedented scale and cost, which included novel factorial designs, have found no effect of basic water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) interventions on childhood stunting, and only mixed effects on childhood diarrhea. Arriving at the inception of the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals, and the bold new target of safely managed water, sanitation and hygiene for all by 2030, these results warrant the attention of researchers, policy-makers and practitioners.Main bodyHere we report the conclusions of an expert meeting convened by the World Health Organization and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to discuss these findings, and present five key consensus messages as a basis for wider discussion and debate in the WASH and nutrition sectors. We judge these trials to have high internal validity, constituting good evidence that these specific interventions had no effect on childhood linear growth, and mixed effects on childhood diarrhea. These results suggest that, in settings such as these, more comprehensive or ambitious WASH interventions may be needed to achieve a major impact on child health.ConclusionThese results are important because such basic interventions are often deployed in low-income rural settings with the expectation of improving child health, although this is rarely the sole justification. Our view is that these three new trials do not show that WASH in general cannot influence child linear growth, but they do demonstrate that these specific interventions had no influence in settings where stunting remains an important public health challenge. We support a call for transformative WASH, in so much as it encapsulates the guiding principle that - in any context - a comprehensive package of WASH interventions is needed that is tailored to address the local exposure landscape and enteric disease burden.
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- 2019
4. Temporal stability of child growth associations in Demographic and Health Surveys in 25 countries
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Rieger, Matthias, Trommlerová, Sofia Karina, Ban, Radu, Jeffers, Kristen, and Hutmacher, Matthew
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- 2019
- Full Text
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5. Four 'new political economy' essays
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Ban, Radu
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320.80954 - Abstract
The first two essays examine the functioning of two local governance institutions empowered or created by the 73rd amendment to the Indian constitution. First, I look at village meetings which were given real decision-making powers by the constitutional amendment, thus becoming real deliberative spaces. The setting of village meetings allows me to study deliberative democracy, a frequently discussed but infrequently empirically examined alternative to preference aggregation (such as through voting). In particular, by using village meetings transcripts and linking them with a household survey, I am able to investigate the relationship between group and individual characteristics, and voice. My main findings show that not all villagers are equally heard in the meetings. I find that the deliberations are not equitable, relative to norms of equal influence relative to group size, and of equal time dedicated to each participant. Second, I look at political reservations for women, mandated by the same constitutional amendment. By using a household survey that includes the household of the village leader, I am able to examine whether the leaders in reserved constituencies are token women, chosen from among the weak women of the village only to be controlled by the traditional elites. I find that the women leaders are not weak, as they are among the younger, wealthier and more knowledgeable women in the village. In addition to this finding about the selection of women, I am also comparing the policy outcomes between reserved and unreserved constituencies. I find that women perform no differently from men in terms of provision of public goods, but also that women perform worse than men in terms of meeting with upper level officials. A finding that emphasizes the antagonism between women leaders and the traditional elites, is that women leaders' performance is negatively affected by the concentration of landowner-ship in the hands of the upper castes. In the third essay I examine the role of gubernatorial political incentives in the provision of assistance to the elderly in the early years of social security in the United States. I find that assistance to the elderly is higher when the term limit is not binding. Furthermore, as predicted by my theoretic model, I find that the term limit effect is present only in the states where the fraction elderly takes on moderate values. In addition the term limit effect is smaller when political competition is less intense. These findings combined suggest that assistance to elderly is shaped by the electoral incentives of the state governor. Finally, in the fourth essay, I examine the change in the likelihood of voting due to a weather shock. In particular, I find that the decrease in the likelihood of voting due to rain during the election day is higher for less educated, relative to more educated individuals. One hypothesis that I put forward is that individuals who experience a lower drop in the likelihood of voting due to rain act strategically because they realize that their vote is likely to weigh more given that overall voting presence is reduced. An important assumption that I make is that, conditional on the comprehensive set of observable individual characteristics, the increase in the cost of voting due to rain is equal across individuals. Using measures of rain for specific time intervals during the election day I make comparisons between individuals for whom this important assumption may hold.
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- 2009
6. Expérimentations aléatoires dans le champ du développement
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Abramowicz, Michel, B. Murray, Megan, Ban, Radu, Bédécarrats, Florent, Cumming, Oliver, Deaton, Angus, Farmer, Paul E., Garchitorena, Andres, Guérin, Isabelle, H. Bonds, Matthew, Hedt-Gauthier, Bethany, J. Heckman, James, Labrousse, Agnès, Morduch, Jonathan, Ogden, Timothy, Picciotto, Robert, Pritchett, Lant, Ravallion, Martin, Roubaud, François, Spears, Dean, Szafarz, Ariane, Vivalt, Eva, Bédécarrats, Florent, Guérin, Isabelle, and Roubaud, François
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Political Science Public Admin. & Development ,Economics (General) ,Public Health & Health Care Science ,économie ,santé publique ,éthique ,économie du développement ,méthodologie ,politiques publiques ,développement ,politique économique - Abstract
En 2019, le prix de la Sveriges Riksbank en sciences économiques en Mémoire d’Alfred Nobel était décerné à trois des principaux promoteurs des expérimentations aléatoires (Randomized Controlled Trials – RCT), pour leur contribution essentielle à la lutte contre la pauvreté. Utilisée de longue date en médecine, l’expérimentation devient aujourd’hui la référence dans le champ des politiques économiques et sociales. Cette suprématie est-elle scientifiquement légitime, éthiquement satisfaisante et politiquement désirable ? Les RCT ont-elles réellement « considérablement amélioré notre capacité à combattre la pauvreté », dont la pandémie de Covid-19 a encore accru l’urgence ? À quelles questions permettent-elles de répondre et quelles autres sont laissées de côté ? Cet ouvrage de référence réunit 26 spécialistes mondiaux sur ce thème (y compris deux éminents lauréats du prix Nobel d’économie), issus d’origines différentes et d’un large spectre de disciplines (économie, statistique, anthropologie, philosophie, santé publique, etc.). Il présente, dans un langage accessible à tous, les principales forces et faiblesses des RCT dans le champ du développement : comment elles fonctionnent, ce qu’on peut en attendre, pourquoi parfois elles échouent, comment elles pourraient être améliorées, et pourquoi d’autres méthodes sont à la fois utiles et nécessaires.
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- 2023
7. Essais et tribulations
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Spears, Dean, Ban, Radu, and Cumming, Oliver
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Political Science Public Admin. & Development ,Economics (General) ,Public Health & Health Care Science ,économie ,santé publique ,éthique ,économie du développement ,méthodologie ,politiques publiques ,développement ,politique économique - Abstract
Ce chapitre présente les débats autour des expérimentations randomisées dans le secteur de l’eau, de l’assainissement et de l’hygiène (Water, Sanitation and Hygiene – WASH), et en tire des enseignements pour les politiques de développement en général. L’assainissement est un cas intéressant, d’une part parce que l’amélioration des systèmes sanitaires est largement reconnue comme un élément essentiel du processus de développement, d’autre part car les interventions dans le secteur WASH sont souvent moins adaptées aux expérimentations randomisées que d’autres sujets appartenant aux sciences de la santé ou à l’économie du développement. Le présent chapitre traite d’une série récente d’évaluations randomisées qui, loin de régler définitivement les questions importantes des politiques d’assainissement en milieu rural, ont ravivé la confusion et le débat dans ce domaine. En effet, même des interventions sanitaires parfaitement conçues et mises en œuvre peuvent produire des effets qui diffèrent de l’une à l’autre ou en fonction des différents contextes, et les faits et théories issus de sources autres que les RCT sont nécessaires (en complément de celles-ci) pour apporter des réponses complètes et opportunes aux problématiques des politiques d’assainissement. Enfin, nous argumentons en faveur d’un recours accru aux RCT dans le secteur WASH sur un point qu’elles pourraient permettre d’éclairer en particulier : répondre à des questions concernant les comportements, plutôt que la santé elle-même.
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- 2023
8. Tokenism or Agency? The Impact of Women’s Reservations on Village Democracies in South India
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Ban, Radu and Rao, Vijayendra
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- 2008
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9. Citywide Inclusive Sanitation: A Public Service Approach for Reaching the Urban Sanitation SDGs
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Schrecongost, Alyse, primary, Pedi, Danielle, additional, Rosenboom, Jan Willem, additional, Shrestha, Roshan, additional, and Ban, Radu, additional
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- 2020
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10. Estimating Safely Managed Sanitation in Urban Areas; Lessons Learned From a Global Implementation of Excreta-Flow Diagrams
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Peal, Andy, primary, Evans, Barbara, additional, Ahilan, Sangaralingam, additional, Ban, Radu, additional, Blackett, Isabel, additional, Hawkins, Peter, additional, Schoebitz, Lars, additional, Scott, Rebecca, additional, Sleigh, Andy, additional, Strande, Linda, additional, and Veses, Oscar, additional
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- 2020
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11. Additional file 1: of The implications of three major new trials for the effect of water, sanitation and hygiene on childhood diarrhea and stunting: a consensus statement
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Cumming, Oliver, Arnold, Benjamin, Ban, Radu, Clasen, Thomas, Mills, Joanna Esteves, Freeman, Matthew, Gordon, Bruce, Guiteras, Raymond, Howard, Guy, Hunter, Paul, Johnston, Richard, Pickering, Amy, Prendergast, Andrew, PrĂźss-UstĂźn, Annette, Rosenboom, Jan, Spears, Dean, Sundberg, Shelly, Wolf, Jennyfer, Null, Clair, Luby, Stephen, Humphrey, Jean, and Colford, John
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education ,bacteria ,environment and public health - Abstract
Table providing full details of Cochrane risk of bias assessment for the WASH-Benefits and SHINE trials (Word document). (DOCX 18 kb)
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- 2019
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12. Measuring open defecation in India using survey questions: evidence from a randomised survey experiment
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Vyas, Sangita, primary, Srivastav, Nikhil, additional, Mary, Divya, additional, Goel, Neeta, additional, Srinivasan, Sujatha, additional, Tannirkulam, Ajaykumar, additional, Ban, Radu, additional, Spears, Dean, additional, and Coffey, Diane, additional
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- 2019
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13. Self-Help Groups, Savings and Social Capital : Evidence from a Field Experiment in Cambodia
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Ban, Radu, Gilligan, Michael J., and Rieger, Matthias
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poverty ,savings ,social capital ,self-help groups ,field experiments - Abstract
This paper studies how self-help groups—village-based organizations designed to encourage savings, household production and social cohesion among the poor—can promote economic and social capital. The paper uses survey data and a wide array of social capital measures to assess the impact of a pilot program that was randomly rolled out in rural villages in Cambodia. The study finds that the program encouraged savings and associations via self-help groups. However it did not improve social capital measured by household and network surveys and lab activities that gauge trust, trustworthiness and the willingness to contribute to public goods. The findings contradict recent work that has found significant positive impacts of such groups on social capital. This paper evaluates community-wide impacts while most previous studies focus on program participants. In addition, the empirical strategy is based on a broader array of social capital measures, including behavioral indicators, suggesting that finding impacts of such programs on social capital is sensitive to the measurement strategy.
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- 2015
14. Is deliberation equitable ? evidence from transcripts of village meetings in south India
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Ban, Radu and Rao, Vijayendra
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FOS: Political science ,Political science ,Access to Finance,Social Accountability,Peri-Urban Communities,Rural Urban Linkages,Anthropology - Abstract
Deliberative decision-making processes are becoming increasingly important around the world to make important decisions about public and private goods allocation, but there is very little empirical evidence about how they actually work. In this paper the authors use data from India extracted from 131 transcripts of village meetings matched with data from household surveys conducted in the same villages prior to the meetings, to study whose preferences are reflected in the meetings. The meetings are constitutionally empowered to make decisions about public and private goods. The findings show that the more land a person owns, the higher the likelihood her preference is mentioned in the meeting, the longer the amount of time spent discussing this preference, and the higher the likelihood that a decision to provide or repair this public or private good is taken. At the same time, the voices of disadvantaged castes, while not dominating the meeting, are also heard. By contrast, the preferences of Muslims are given less time. High village literacy and the presence of higher level officials during village meetings mitigate the power of the landed, but political reservations for low castes for the post of village president increase the power of the landed.
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- 2009
15. The Political Economy of Village Sanitation in South India: Capture or Poor Information?
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Ban, Radu, Das Gupta, Monica, and Rao, Vijayendra
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Sociology [T19] ,"Social services ,association" ,Politics [T17] ,India [L13] - Abstract
Despite efforts to mandate and finance local governments' provision of environmental sanitation services, outcomes remain poor in the villages surveyed in the four South Indian states. The analysis indicates some key issues that appear to hinder improvements in sanitation. Local politicians tend to capture sanitary infrastructure and cleaning services for themselves, while also keeping major village roads reasonably well-served. Their decisions suggest, however, that they neither understand the health benefits of sanitation, nor the negative externalities to their own health if surrounding areas are poorly served. Our findings suggest that improving sanitary outcomes requires disseminating information on the public goods nature of their health benefits, as well as on the local government's responsibilities. It also requires putting public health regulations in place, along with measures to enable accountability in service provision.
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- 2008
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