Sebastian Vollmer
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 338223 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Sebastian Vollmer |
| PRENOMES | Sebastian |
| SOBRENOME | Vollmer |
| ASSINATURA | VOLLMER S |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of Göttingen |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7863-0462 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 58 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 105 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 58 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2007 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 6 |
Effects of a participatory learning and action programme in women's groups on adolescent girls
Our findings suggest that Gram Varta did not change attitudes and knowledge of adolescent girls on the community-level. This could be due to low participation of girls in programme meetings as well as low levels of information sharing between adults who took part in this programme and adolescent girls
Effects of a large-scale participatory learning and action programme in women's groups on knowledge and behaviour related to pregnancy and childcare
Our results do not discredit the effectiveness of PLA interventions in general. They highlight that PLA interventions delivered through existing women's self-help groups need to consider the particular challenges to participation faced by pregnant women
Measuring child food poverty
Objective: The aim of this study is to analyse complementary feeding practices, to assess the extent to which minimum dietary diversity (MDD) recommendations are being met in the population studied and to study factors that influence the achievement of MDD. Design: We pooled individual level data form the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) and Multi Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS). We apply methods from poverty measurement to identify individu…
Developing Effective and Value-Aligned AI Tools for Journalists
Counting missing women
Stock estimates of missing women suggest that excess female deaths are concentrated in South and East Asia and among young children. In contrast, flow estimates suggest that gender bias in mortality is much larger than previously estimated using stock measures, is as severe among adults as it is among children in India and China, and is larger in Sub-Saharan Africa than in India and China. We show that the different stock and flow measure results…
Global poverty and the cost of a healthy diet
Formal vs. informal mathematics
While school-aged children in resource-poor settings often perform poorly on standardized tests in mathematics, they can frequently be seen engaging in market activities, conducting monetary transactions. This suggests that children in these settings actually have much more advanced skills in basic mathematics than what is assessed at school. For this study, we designed a learning assessment that captures a broader skill set, including tasks pres…
Multiple cardiovascular risk factor care in 55 low- and middle-income countries
The prevalence of multiple age-related cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk factors is high among individuals living in low- and middle-income countries. We described receipt of healthcare services for and management of hypertension and diabetes among individuals living with these conditions using individual-level data from 55 nationally representative population-based surveys (2009–2019) with measured blood pressure (BP) and diabetes biomarker. We …
Individual characteristics associated with road traffic collisions and healthcare seeking in low- and middle-income countries and territories
Incidence of road traffic collisions (RTCs), types of users involved, and healthcare requirement afterwards are essential information for efficient policy making. We analysed individual-level data from nationally representative surveys conducted in low- or middle-income countries (LMICs) between 2008–2019. We describe the weighted incidence of non-fatal RTC in the past 12 months, type of road user involved, and incidence of traffic injuries requi…
Social cohesion among Syrian and Turkish children, adolescents, and young adults in Turkey
Turkey has received a large influx of Syrian refugees since the start of Syrian civil war in 2011. Integration and social cohesion have become important issues for public policy in Turkey. We study social cohesion among young Turkish nationals and Syrian refugees. Our study sample comprises of adolescents and young adults (12–30 years), and children (6–11 years) who participated in events of the “Education Program for Syrian Refugees and Host Com…
The prevalence of cardiovascular disease risk factors among adults living in extreme poverty
Covid-19 pandemic, losses of livelihoods and uneven recovery in Pune, India
This study examines the patterns of losses in livelihoods, income and consumption expenditure among slum dwellers in Pune, a city in western India, two years after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. A four-round panel dataset is used for this study with two rounds collected before (in-person in 2018 and 2019) and two rounds collected after (via phone interviews in 2020 and 2022) the start of the pandemic. Although at the macro-level gross dom…
Medium‐Run Impacts of Iron‐Fortified School Lunch on Anaemia, Cognition, and Learning Outcomes in India
Using a phase‐in research design, we provide experimental evidence on the impacts of early versus late initiation of iron fortification in school lunch programmes on children's health and cognitive outcomes in India. We find higher haemoglobin levels and a lower likelihood of anaemia in the early treatment group that experienced 4 years of treatment, compared to the late treatment group that was exposed to one and a half years of treatment. Despi…
Impact of the WHO Safe Childbirth Checklist on safety culture among health workers
The World Health Organization (WHO) developed the Safe Childbirth Checklist (SCC) to increase the application of essential birth practices to ultimately reduce perinatal and maternal deaths. We study the effects of the SCC on health workers safety culture, in the framework of a cluster-randomized controlled trial (16 treatment facilities/16 control facilities). We introduced the SCC in combination with a medium intensity coaching in health facili…
Health service readiness to provide care for HIV and cardiovascular disease risk factors in low- and middle-income countries
Cardiovascular disease risk factors (CVDRF), in particular diabetes and hypertension, are chronic conditions which carry a substantial disease burden in Low- and Middle-Income Countries. Unlike HIV, they were neglected in the Millenium Development Goals along with the health services required to manage them. To inform the level of health service readiness that could be achieved with increased attention, we compared readiness for CVDRF with that f…
The effect of the WHO Safe Childbirth Checklist on essential delivery practices and birth outcomes
We study the effect of the Safe Childbirth Checklist (SCC) - a tool developed by the WHO to improve the quality of delivery care - on a range of provider- and patient-level outcomes. We conducted a clustered pair-wise matched randomized controlled trial among 166 health providers in two districts of Pakistan. This included primary and secondary health facilities as well as non-facility based rural health workers. We do not find positive effects o…
Association of parental characteristics with offspring anthropometric failure, anaemia and mortality in India
This study used a wide range of information on parental sociodemographic, physical and behavioural characteristics as well as on the presence of non-communicable diseases among parents and examined the association of these attributes with anthropometric failure, anaemia and mortality of their children aged 0–59 months. Findings revealed that children of fathers aged 30–39 years were less likely to experience anthropometric failure and anaemia; ho…
How to ensure full vaccination? The association of institutional delivery and timely postnatal care with childhood vaccination in a cross-sectional study in rural Bihar, India
Incomplete and absent doses in routine childhood vaccinations are of major concern. Health systems in low- and middle-income countries (LMIC), in particular, often struggle to enable full vaccination of children, which affects their immunity against communicable diseases. Data on child vaccination cards from a cross-sectional primary survey with 1,967 households were used to assess the vaccination status. The association of timely postnatal care …
Patterns of multimorbidity in India
There is a dearth of evidence on the epidemiology of multimorbidity in low- and middle-income countries. This study aimed to determine the prevalence of multimorbidity in India and its variation among states and population groups. We analyzed data from a nationally representative household survey conducted in 2015–2016 among individuals aged 15 to 49 years. Multimorbidity was defined as having two or more conditions out of five common chronic mor…
Maternal iron-and-folic-acid supplementation and its association with low-birth weight and neonatal mortality in India
Objective: The current study assessed intake of iron-and-folic-acid (IFA) tablet/syrup (grouped into none, Design: The cross-sectional, nationally representative, 2015–2016 National Family Health Survey (NFHS-4) data were used. Weighted descriptive analysis and multiple binary logistic regression modelling were used. Setting: NFHS-4 covered 640 districts from thirty-seven states and union territories of India. Participants: A total of 120 374 and…
Food group consumption patterns among children meeting and not meeting WHO’s recommended dietary diversity
A quantile regression analysis of dietary diversity and anthropometric outcomes among children and women in the rural–urban interface of Bangalore, India
Knowing Versus Doing
The COVID-19 pandemic shapes the lives of people around the globe – at the same time, people themselves have the power to shape the pandemic. By employing protective health behaviour, the population can alleviate the severity of an outbreak. This may be of particular importance whenever health systems or populations are vulnerable to shocks, as is frequently the case in low- and middle-income settings. Therefore, understanding the underlying driv…
The wealth gradient in diarrhoea, acute respiratory infections, and malaria in childhood over time
BACKGROUND: While the prevalence of childhood diseases and related mortality have been decreasing over the past decades, progress has been unequally distributed. The poorest households often carry the highest disease burden. As morbidity and mortality also decline most slowly among children of the poorest households, socioeconomic status may become a more relevant risk factor for childhood diseases. METHODS: We analysed the association between so…
Correlates of HIV seropositivity in young West and Central African women
BACKGROUND: Young women in West and Central Africa have been described by the United Nations as being especially vulnerable to HIV/AIDS. Despite a consensus that increased efforts are necessary to address the needs of this particular demographic, correlates of HIV seropositivity in young West and Central African women have not been systematically described. This study fills this gap using a rich set of publicly available survey data. METHODS: For…
Gender‐Specific Migration from Eastern to Western Germany
With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, open migration from East to West Germany became possible. Between 1989 and 2007, roughly 10 per cent of the East’s population at the time of reunification migrated from east to west. The emigrants were predominantly young and female. This selective migration pattern led to a tremendous deficit of females in the 18–29 year old age group in eastern Germany. Overall, the sex ratio in that age group is as low…
Drought and Early Child Health in Rural India
Economic Growth and Child Undernutrition in sub-Saharan Africa
Despite recent improvements in economic performance, undernutrition rates in sub-Saharan Africa appear to have improved much less and rather inconsistently across the continent. We examine to what extent there is an empirical linkage between income growth and reductions of child undernutrition in Africa. We pool all DHS surveys for African countries, control for other correlates of undernutrition, and add country-level GDP per capita. We find tha…
A Reversal in the Relationship of Human Development With Fertility
Myrskylä et al. (2009) found that the relationship between the human development index (HDI) and the total fertility rate (TFR) reverses from negative (i.e., increases in HDI are associated with decreases in TFR) to positive (i.e., increases in HDI are associated with increases in TFR) at an HDI level of 0.86. In this article, we show that the reversal in the HDI-TFR relationship is robust to neither the UNDP’s recent revision in the HDI calculat…
Inequality and growth
This paper uses heterogeneous panel cointegration techniques to estimate the long-run effect of income inequality on per-capita income for 46 countries over the period 1970–1995. We find that inequality has a negative long-run effect on income, both for the sample as a whole and for important sub-groups within the sample (developed countries, developing countries, democracies, and non-democracies). The effect is economically important, with a mag…
Long-run trends of human aging and longevity
Over the last 200 years, humans experienced a huge increase of life expectancy. These advances were largely driven by extrinsic improvements of their environment (for example, the available diet, disease prevalence, vaccination, and the state of hygiene and sanitation). In this paper, we ask whether future improvements of life expectancy will be bounded from above by human life span. Life span, in contrast to life expectancy, is conceptualized as…
The relationship between energy intensity and economic growth
Measuring Socioeconomic Inequalities With Predicted Absolute Incomes Rather Than Wealth Quintiles
Objectives. To compare the predictive power of synthetic absolute income measures with that of asset-based wealth quintiles in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) using child stunting as an outcome. Methods. We pooled data from 239 nationally representative household surveys from LMICs and computed absolute incomes in US dollars based on households’ asset rank as well as data on national consumption and inequality levels. We used multivariab…
The Impact of a Customs Union between Turkey and the EU on Turkey's Exports to the EU
This article investigates Turkey's sectoral trade flows to the EU based on panel data from the period 1988 to 2002. Turkey's 16 most important export sectors are analysed. Emphasis is placed on the role of price competition, EU protection and transport costs in the export trade between Turkey and the EU. The empirical model used is an extended version of the gravity model. This study is also a contribution to the current discussion of whether Tur…
The interaction between district-level development and individual-level socioeconomic gradients of cardiovascular disease risk factors in India
Household economic strengthening through financial and psychosocial programming
Food group consumption patterns among children meeting and not meeting WHO’s recommended dietary diversity
One Size Fits All? The Validity of a Composite Poverty Index Across Urban and Rural Households in South Africa
Global poverty and the cost of a healthy diet
A quantile regression analysis of dietary diversity and anthropometric outcomes among children and women in the rural–urban interface of Bangalore, India
The fertility transition around the world
The Impact of a Customs Union between Turkey and the EU on Turkey's Exports to the EU
This article investigates Turkey's sectoral trade flows to the EU based on panel data from the period 1988 to 2002. Turkey's 16 most important export sectors are analysed. Emphasis is placed on the role of price competition, EU protection and transport costs in the export trade between Turkey and the EU. The empirical model used is an extended version of the gravity model. This study is also a contribution to the current discussion of whether Tur…
Where Have All the Young Women Gone? Gender-Specific Migration from East to West Germany
With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, direct migration from East to West Germany became possible. Between 1989 and 2007 more than 1.7 million, or 10 percent of the East's population, migrated to the West. A surprising and rarely investigated outcome of this migration process is that about 55 percent of all (net) East-to-West migrants since 1989 have been female. Since more than half of the migrants were younger than 30 years old, this selecti…
Political Institutions And Human Development - Does Democracy Fulfil Its 'Constructive' And 'Instrumental' Role?
Institutions are a major field of interest in the study of development processes. The authors contribute to this discussion concentrating our research on political institutions and their effect on the non-income dimensions of human development. First, they elaborate a theoretical argument why and under what conditions democracies compared to autocratic political systems might perform better with regards to the provision of public goods. Due to hi…
A Contribution to the Empirics of Economic and Human Development
This book contributes to the empirical literature on economic and human development from five different perspectives: the first chapter provides a new statistical test for bimodality of densities with an application to income data. The second chapter analyzes the worlds cross-country distribution of income and challenges the so called Twin Peaks-claim. The third chapter focuses on the world income distribution and resulting implications for pover…
Inequality and growth
This paper uses heterogeneous panel cointegration techniques to estimate the long-run effect of income inequality on per-capita income for 46 countries over the period 1970–1995. We find that inequality has a negative long-run effect on income, both for the sample as a whole and for important sub-groups within the sample (developed countries, developing countries, democracies, and non-democracies). The effect is economically important, with a mag…
Gender‐Specific Migration from Eastern to Western Germany
With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, open migration from East to West Germany became possible. Between 1989 and 2007, roughly 10 per cent of the East’s population at the time of reunification migrated from east to west. The emigrants were predominantly young and female. This selective migration pattern led to a tremendous deficit of females in the 18–29 year old age group in eastern Germany. Overall, the sex ratio in that age group is as low…
Long-run trends of human aging and longevity
Over the last 200 years, humans experienced a huge increase of life expectancy. These advances were largely driven by extrinsic improvements of their environment (for example, the available diet, disease prevalence, vaccination, and the state of hygiene and sanitation). In this paper, we ask whether future improvements of life expectancy will be bounded from above by human life span. Life span, in contrast to life expectancy, is conceptualized as…
The fertility transition around the world
Economic Growth and Child Undernutrition in sub-Saharan Africa
Despite recent improvements in economic performance, undernutrition rates in sub-Saharan Africa appear to have improved much less and rather inconsistently across the continent. We examine to what extent there is an empirical linkage between income growth and reductions of child undernutrition in Africa. We pool all DHS surveys for African countries, control for other correlates of undernutrition, and add country-level GDP per capita. We find tha…
A Reversal in the Relationship of Human Development With Fertility
Myrskylä et al. (2009) found that the relationship between the human development index (HDI) and the total fertility rate (TFR) reverses from negative (i.e., increases in HDI are associated with decreases in TFR) to positive (i.e., increases in HDI are associated with increases in TFR) at an HDI level of 0.86. In this article, we show that the reversal in the HDI-TFR relationship is robust to neither the UNDP’s recent revision in the HDI calculat…
The HIV Epidemic in Sub-Saharan Africa is Aging
One Size Fits All? The Validity of a Composite Poverty Index Across Urban and Rural Households in South Africa
Drought and Early Child Health in Rural India
Measuring Socioeconomic Inequalities With Predicted Absolute Incomes Rather Than Wealth Quintiles
Objectives. To compare the predictive power of synthetic absolute income measures with that of asset-based wealth quintiles in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) using child stunting as an outcome. Methods. We pooled data from 239 nationally representative household surveys from LMICs and computed absolute incomes in US dollars based on households’ asset rank as well as data on national consumption and inequality levels. We used multivariab…
Measuring progress from 1990 to 2017 and projecting attainment to 2030 of the health-related Sustainable Development Goals for 195 countries and territories
BACKGROUND: Efforts to establish the 2015 baseline and monitor early implementation of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) highlight both great potential for and threats to improving health by 2030. To fully deliver on the SDG aim of "leaving no one behind", it is increasingly important to examine the health-related SDGs beyond national-level estimates. As part of the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study 2017 (GBD 2…
Household economic strengthening through financial and psychosocial programming
Past, present, and future of global health financing
BACKGROUND: Comprehensive and comparable estimates of health spending in each country are a key input for health policy and planning, and are necessary to support the achievement of national and international health goals. Previous studies have tracked past and projected future health spending until 2040 and shown that, with economic development, countries tend to spend more on health per capita, with a decreasing share of spending from developme…
The state of hypertension care in 44 low-income and middle-income countries
Agricultural trade policies and child nutrition in low- and middle-income countries
BACKGROUND: There has been growing interest in understanding the role of agricultural trade policies in diet and nutrition. This cross-country study examines associations between government policies on agricultural trade prices and child nutrition outcomes, particularly undernutrition. METHODS: This study links panel data on government distortions to agricultural incentives to data from 212,258 children aged 6 to 35 months participating in Demogr…
Educational gender gaps and economic growth
The relationship between energy intensity and economic growth
The interaction between district-level development and individual-level socioeconomic gradients of cardiovascular disease risk factors in India
Individual and social predictors of smoking and obesity
This is a longitudinal study of changes in smoking behaviour as well as becoming overweight/obese (OW/OB) and the strength of their association with personal factors such as self-control, mental health, and socioeconomic status (SES) versus their connection with the behaviour of other household members. Furthermore, we investigate that in terms of roles within a household, who is more vulnerable towards the behaviour of others. We used a hybrid m…
Knowing Versus Doing
The COVID-19 pandemic shapes the lives of people around the globe – at the same time, people themselves have the power to shape the pandemic. By employing protective health behaviour, the population can alleviate the severity of an outbreak. This may be of particular importance whenever health systems or populations are vulnerable to shocks, as is frequently the case in low- and middle-income settings. Therefore, understanding the underlying driv…
The wealth gradient in diarrhoea, acute respiratory infections, and malaria in childhood over time
BACKGROUND: While the prevalence of childhood diseases and related mortality have been decreasing over the past decades, progress has been unequally distributed. The poorest households often carry the highest disease burden. As morbidity and mortality also decline most slowly among children of the poorest households, socioeconomic status may become a more relevant risk factor for childhood diseases. METHODS: We analysed the association between so…
Medicine (38 obras) · Demography (29 obras) · Population (27 obras) · Environmental health (25 obras) · Economics (21 obras) · Child Nutrition and Water Access (19 obras) · Psychology (17 obras) · Sociology (16 obras) · Geography (15 obras) · Global Maternal and Child Health (15 obras)