Global food prices have risen sharply since 2007. The impact of food price spikes on the risk of malnutrition in children is not well understood. The researchers investigated the associations between food price spikes and childhood malnutrition in Andhra Pradesh, one of India’s largest states, with >85 million people.

Taxing sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) has been proposed in high-income countries to reduce obesity and type 2 diabetes. We sought to estimate the potential health effects of such a fiscal strategy in the middle-income country of India, where there is heterogeneity in SSB consumption, patterns of substitution between SSBs and other beverages after tax increases, and vast differences in chronic disease risk within the population.

This article stresses that any impact assessment of health insurance schemes is sensitive to the methodology as well as the data used for analysis. It is based on two recent studies evaluating the impact of publicly-fi nanced health insurance schemes on benefi ciaries.

In 2008, India’s Labour Ministry launched a hospital insurance scheme called Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana (RSBY) covering ‘Below Poverty Line’ (BPL) households. RSBY is implemented through insurance companies; premiums are subsidized by Union and States governments (75 : 25%). We examined RSBY’s enrolment of BPL, costs vs. budgets and policy ramifications.

This study specifically addresses the issue of low level of health insurance coverage with special reference to private health insurance. The study analyses the rational behavior of insurance agents in the scale-up process of health insurance in an imperfect market.