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The majority of Palestinian refugees living in Lebanon lives in poverty. This can be observed across a number of socioeconomic indicators such as low income and few assets held by the household, poor housing, poor educational achievements, poor health, and others. However, these factors, while completing the picture of what it means to be poor for a Palestinian household, fail to explain the persistence of the low socioeconomic status suffered by most Palestinian households. This article argues that restriction of access to major social and occupational institutions of society tremendously affects the living conditions of Palestinian households. Identifying these restrictions as systematic social exclusion, this article outlines mechanisms of exclusion. Particular attention is given to the camp as a form of urban exclusion, aggravating the existing legal discrimination against Palestinian refugees.

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This paper evaluates the impact of migrant remittances on human capital accumulation among youth. An augmented human capital model with two outcomes, education attendance and education attainment, is estimated using a large nationally representative household survey from Jordan. Empirical results show that migrant remittance receipt has a positive effect on education attendance. This finding is obtained while controlling for other socio‐economic determinants of schooling behavior and is robust to censorship and endogeneity bias. The results also indicate that the magnitude of the remittance impact on both education outcomes is larger for men compared with that of women.

BackgroundThe health sector in Lebanon suffers from high levels of spending and is acknowledged to be a source of fiscal waste. Lebanon initiated a series of health sector reforms which aim at containing the fiscal waste caused by high and inefficient public health expenditures. Yet these reforms do not address the issues of health equity in use and coverage of healthcare services, which appear to be acute. This paper takes a closer look at the micro-level inequities in the use of healthcare, in access, in ability to pay, and in some health outcomes.MethodsWe use data from the 2004/2005 Multi Purpose Survey of Households in Lebanon to conduct health equity analysis, including equity in need, access and outcomes. We briefly describe the data and explain some of its limitations. We examine, in turn, and using standardization techniques, the equity in health care utilization, the impact of catastrophic health payments on household wellbeing, the effect of health payment on household impoverishment, the equity implications of existing health financing methods, and health characteristics by geographical region.ResultsWe find that the incidence of disability decreases steadily across expenditure quintiles, whereas the incidence of chronic disease shows the opposite pattern, which may be an indication of better diagnostics for higher quintiles. The presence of any health-related expenditure is regressive while the magnitude of out-of-pocket expenditures on health is progressive. Spending on health is found to be "normal" and income-elastic. Catastrophic health payments are likelier among disadvantaged groups (in terms of income, geography and gender). However, the cash amounts of catastrophic payments are progressive. Poverty is associated with lower insurance coverage for both private and public insurance. While the insured seem to spend an average of almost LL93,000 ($62) on health a year in excess of the uninsured, they devote a smaller proportion of their expenditures to health.ConclusionsThe lowest quintiles of expenditures per adult have less of an ability to pay out-of-pocket for healthcare, and yet incur healthcare expenditures more often than the wealthy. They have lower rates of insurance coverage, causing them to spend a larger proportion of their expenditures on health, and further confirming our results on the vulnerability of the bottom quintiles.

The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent.

This paper develops a new indicator for human development, the Composite Global Well-Being Index (CGWBI), spanning ten well-being dimensions: safety and security, health, education, housing, environment and living space, employment, income, life satisfaction, community and social life, and civic engagement. The index includes both subjective survey data and socio-economic indicators, and uses the same methodology as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Better Life Index, by extending it to developing countries. The paper's results show that the devised CGWBI is highly correlated with the widely used Human Development Index (HDI); however, the CGWBI is less sensitive to income effects than the HDI. The CGWBI provides therefore an improvement over the HDI, by covering additional key well-being dimensions and minimizing the impact of per capita income on overall human development rankings.