Population and reproductive health: An economic framework for policy evaluation

This article provides a standard economic framework to evaluate policies in the population and reproductive health fields and illustrates its use in o rder to facilitate cross-disciplinary exchanges between economists and othe rs working in these areas. This framework justifies policy interventions to increase efficiency and productivity and to redistribute resources. The ar ticle illustrates this framework with a cost-benefit analysis of a safe mot herhood project in Indonesia and a distributional analysis of family planni ng and reproductive health services in Vietnam. Application of the policy f ramework to a number of resource and finance issues in population and repro ductive health suggests that a significant program bias favors publicly pro vided services and hinders the emergence of a more efficient mix of private and public providers competing on an equal basis.