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What Determines Cross‐Country Access to Antiretroviral Treatment?
Author(s) -
Nattrass Nicoli
Publication year - 2006
Publication title -
development policy review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.671
H-Index - 61
eISSN - 1467-7679
pISSN - 0950-6764
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-7679.2006.00327.x
Subject(s) - latin americans , per capita , antiretroviral therapy , development economics , developing country , democracy , human immunodeficiency virus (hiv) , per capita income , politics , scale (ratio) , economic growth , economics , political science , demographic economics , geography , demography , medicine , environmental health , virology , viral load , population , sociology , cartography , law
Despite the recent international effort to expand access to highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) in developing countries, its coverage still varies significantly from country to country and is strongly correlated with per capita income. However, regional and political variables are also important. Cross‐country regressions indicate that, controlling for political and economic characteristics and the scale of the HIV epidemic, Latin American and African countries have better coverage than predicted. Whereas the level of HIV prevalence was a significantly (negative) factor when accounting for HAART coverage in June 2004, this effect had disappeared by December 2004. The improvement appears to have benefited democratic countries in particular.