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Objective – This chapter assesses health equity achievements of the Thai health system before and after the introduction of the universal coverage (UC) policy. It examines five dimensions of equity: equity in financial contributions, the incidence of catastrophic health expenditure, the degree of impoverishment as a result of household out-of-pocket payments for health, equity in health service use and the incidence of public subsidies for health.

Methodology – The standard methods proposed by O’Donnell, van Doorslaer, and Wagstaff (2008b) were used to measure equity in financial contribution, healthcare utilization and public subsidies, and in assessing the incidence of catastrophic health expenditure and impoverishment. Two major national representative household survey datasets were used: Socio-Economic Surveys and Health and Welfare Surveys.

Findings – General tax was the most progressive source of finance in Thailand. Because this source dominates total financing, the overall outcome was progressive, with the rich contributing a greater share of their income than the poor. The low incidence of catastrophic health expenditure and impoverishment before UC was further reduced after UC. Use of healthcare and the distribution of government subsidies were both pro-poor: in particular, the functioning of primary healthcare (PHC) at the district level serves as a “pro-poor hub” in translating policy into practice and equity outcomes.

Policy implications – The Thai health financing reforms have been accompanied by nationwide extension of PHC coverage, mandatory rural health service by new graduates and systems redesign, especially the introduction of a contracting model and closed-ended provider payment methods. Together, these changes have led to a more equitable and more efficient health system. Institutional capacity to generate evidence and to translate it into policy decisions, effective implementation and comprehensive monitoring and evaluation are essential to successful system-level reforms.

This paper explores some gendered impacts of resettlement in the Lesotho Highlands Water Project (LHWP). Based on 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Lesotho, Southern Africa, I use a feminist political ecology framework to analyze the ways host and settler communities negotiate development-induced resettlement and how resettlement conditions (re)produce gendered social interests in the context of the LHWP. While material losses are typically compensated during resettlement, the non-material, psycho-social aspects of loss do not get compensated. After resettlement, however, it is the unpaid, uncompensated community work of women that offers opportunities for adjustment into the new communities.

This chapter examines the impoverishment process in three South Caucasian states: Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia. It uses the concept of ‘order of curtailment’ of consumption expenditures to detect the order of curtailment of expenditures in the Caucasus region. It then suggests computing poverty rates on the basis of a threshold corresponding to the curtailment of a certain number of consumption expenditures categories and compares the poverty rates obtained with those derived from more traditional approaches to the unidimensional measurement of poverty. The empirical illustrations are based on the Caucasus Barometer surveys of 2009 and 2013.

This chapter provides a brief overview of our understanding of major public health challenges and environmental concerns in Karakalpakstan today, and highlights questions that still remain unanswered. As seen in the case of Muynak, the fishing town on the southern edge of the former Aral Sea, ecological disasters do not happen alone – they spur socioeconomic disasters that only heighten the health disasters. The loss of the sea, the loss of local livelihoods, and mass out-migration of the population, along with economic depression following the collapse of the Soviet Union, have adversely affected the community living in Muynak. They face major public health challenges, such as tuberculosis, multidrug resistant tuberculosis, and anemia as a result of their impoverishment. The desiccation of the Aral Sea is but one of the many disasters linked to intensive cotton cultivation in Uzbekistan. Pesticide contamination and the salinization of drinking water in Karakalpakstan are yet other environmental disasters that further threaten the health of the population and of future generations. Currently, there is an urgent need for greater international involvement and collaboration with Uzbeks to reverse the poor public health trends and to study the extent of environmental contamination in communities across Karakalpakstan, in order to reduce the health threats presented by these.

This study reveals that despite the negative effects of migration, the Tanzanian government has not done enough to address migration-related health issues. This is owing to inadequate data or information about effects of migration in the country. Dodoma region, the focus of this study, is selected for its migration-inducing factors as they relate to the declining health status of its inhabitants. Harsh climatic conditions causing irregular and inadequate rainfall and prolonged drought have led to a severe decline of the health of the poor. The region is entirely dependent on subsistence agriculture and livestock production. The small-scale production is locally practiced at household level. Extreme poverty motivates rural people to migrate to cities with the main migrant groups being middle school (about 13 to 15 years old) and high school dropouts (15 to 18 years old), and youth including young parents (18 to 35 years old). The rural-urban migration conjoined with harsh climatic conditions significantly downsizes local population, available agricultural labor force, and further endangers food security. More importantly, however, due to exposure to HIV in the cities, most migrants who are unable to find city jobs return home terminally ill with HIV/AIDS, which further adds to impoverishment of rural families and to downsizing of rural population.

The rebirth of populist agenda echoes at the end of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st century is the birth of populist unrest in democratic and in authoritarian regimes alike – in Europe, the Middle East, America, Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Regardless of many faces and appeals to diverse constituencies, as well as clearly established trends, a current escalation in the rapid and widespread development of populist insurgency is an outcome of two factors. One is the weakness of representative politics and the party system in many states across the globe. The other is the global economic recession or crisis that has led to an increase in economic disparity between social classes and impoverishment of the poorer and middle social strata combined with the establishment of global economic, multinational giants.

To explore the essential elements of a ‘green art of living’: an enjoyable, elegant, graceful and simultaneously low impact lifestyle.

The theoretical analysis is based on a critical reading and literature study of the texts of various prominent ecological utopian thinkers in the history of political philosophy.

In an ecologically sustainable society first priority must be given to re-examination of the proper ‘ecological limits’ of the current lifestyles and ‘arts of living’ in the Western world. The exact form or shape that people give to their lives is less important than their overall commitment to live within the ecological boundaries set by our earth.

A green, ecologically responsible society cannot do without a certain degree of moderation, self-restraint and simpler and less consumption-oriented lifestyles. However, in this chapter it is shown that such a society will not lead to impoverishment and austerity. An ecological society founded on voluntary simplicity will not be frugal or poor, but creates ample opportunities for its citizens to lead attractive, pleasurable, fulfilling and high-quality lives.

In the early 1990s, the single-party regime of the Mouvement Révolutionnaire Nationale pour le Développement (MRND), headed by President Juvénal Habyarimana, came under growing pressure both internally and externally. Rwanda experienced widespread destitution and famine as state revenues from coffee exports fell from an annual US $144 million in 1985 to a mere US $30 million in 1993 (Debiel, 2003, p. 166). A Structural Adjustment Program (SAP), imposed upon Rwanda by the Bretton Woods institutions in September 1991, was largely irrelevant, if not conducive, to the rising impoverishment of the Rwandan people (Chossudovsky, 1994, p. 21). Between 1989 and 1993, the proportion of the population consuming less than 1,000 calories a day doubled from 15 percent to 31 percent (Maton, 1994).

In recent years, the concept of “reification” has virtually disappeared from debates in social theory, including critical social theory. The concept was at the center of the revitalization of Marxist theory in the early twentieth century generally known as Western Marxism. Georg Lukács in particular introduced the concept to express how the process described in Marx's critique of alienation and commodification could be grasped more effectively by combining it with Max Weber's theory of rationalization (see Agger, 1979; Stedman Jones et al., 1977).¹ In Lukács's use, the concept of reification captured the process by which advanced capitalist production, as opposed to earlier stages of capitalist development, assimilated processes of social, cultural, and political production and reproduction to the dynamic imperatives and logic of capitalist accumulation. It is not just interpersonal relations and forms of organization constituting the capitalist production process that are being refashioned along the lines of one specific definition of economic necessity. In addition, and more consequentially, the capitalist mode of production also assimilates to its specific requirements the ways in which human beings think the world. As a result, the continuous expansion and perfection of capitalist production and its control over the work environment impoverishes concrete social, political, and cultural forms of coexistence and cooperation, and it brings about an impoverishment of our ability to conceive of reality from a variety of social, political, and philosophical viewpoints.

This chapter attempts to critically examine the wildlife conservation discourse that argues for curtailing the livestock grazing inside the Changthang Wildlife Sanctuary, situated on the India’s international borders with China in southeast Ladakh. The conventional conservation discourse points at the (supposed) greed of the Changpa pastoralists in accumulating an increasing number of pashmina goats as a primary environmental cause of wildlife loss in Changthang; however, there is a critical lack of insight into the political and historical mechanisms that lie within the dynamic interaction between resource access and socio-economic inequalities, critical for understanding Changpa pastoralism today.

Ethnographic inquiry into the Changpa economy before the closure of Ladakh–Tibet border trade in 1962, and afterwards, has highlighted the political and economic transformations in the area, as well as the cultural politics of market integration and increasing inabilities of the mobile Changpa pastoralists to access vital productive resources. Inequalities reflected in the contemporary livestock data, acquired from the pastoralists, underscore the processes of institutional bricolage, non-cooperative labour, exchange/wage herding and capital-dominated market networks, making pastoralism impossible for several of the households.

The chapter argues against making livestock withdrawal a major aim of conservation sciences. It calls instead for the recognition of state-provisioned commodified pashmina rearing, seen through the prism of changing abilities and shifting institutions, where unequal access to productive resources is a reflection of both historical dispossessions and also economic impoverishments of Changpa today.