Some links on useful datasets and miscellaneous items. I have not updated these materials in recent years.
Lohmar, Zhang and Gale (2004) provide some introductory words on household data in China. As for large-scale survey work, there has been data collection on agricultural production since 1949, but that data is scant and prone to biases. Since 1977 an annual survey of 68,000 households (with a 3-year rotation) has been organized by the National Bureau of Statistics. The Ministry of Agriculture surveys 21,000 households yearly in a panel since 1986.
Lohmar, B., Zhang, L. and Gale, F. (2004) "New Opportunities for Economic Analysis with Rural Household Data in China" (accessed February 5, 2006)
China Data Center at the University of Michigan
China Dimensions at the Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC)
China Health and Family Life Survey (CHFLS) at the University of Chicago
China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
China Population Information and Research Center (CPIRC)
Gansu Human Capital Project at Penn
Germany’s health insurance serves as model for social health insurance projects world wide. In fact, as institution the social health insurance has been surprisingly successful and resilient over time – it celebrated its 125th birthday in 2008. The system has its problems and since the early 1990s a wave of progressively more fundamental reforms was enacted. A less well known fact is that Germany also has a private health insurance sector which covers about 10 percent of the population. The private system is fundamentally different from the social health insurance in aspects from financing to quality, and covers mostly civil servants and high-income earners. That system was also affected by the recent round of reforms.
Up-to-date literature on the German health care system is somewhat rare, especially with regards to details. The recent reforms have changed fundamental elements of the system and so far I have not found a good summary of them all, in either German or English. Below some useful background, comments welcome.
This list contains links to micro and macro-level data, mainly related to economics. I have not updated this list for a while.
Here some links on the issue. My Master's thesis on "Scaling-Up and Mainstreaming: Increasing Impact of International Child Supports (ICS) De-Worming Program in Western Province, Kenya" is available on request. I also have an extensive bibliography which was last updated in March 2005
Brooker, S. (2006). "Spatial Epidemiology of Human Schistosomiasis in Africa: Risk Models, Transmission Dynamics and Control." Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene 101(1): 1-8
Great paper on spatial epidemiology and mapping; also has a map of schistosomiasis intensities in East Africa
Fenwick, A. (2006). "New Initiatives against Africa's Worms." Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene 100(3): 200-207.
Policy-paper on deworming, with a focus on the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative
Kabatereine, N. B., E. Tukahebwa, et al. (2006). "Progress Towards Countrywide Control of Schistosomiasis and Soil-Transmitted Helminthiasis in Uganda." Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene 100(3): 208-215.<
Details on the Ugandan national deworming program
Wang, L., Utzinger, J. and Zhou, X.N. (2008). "Schistosomiasis Control: Experiences and Lessons from China." The Lancet 372(9652): 1793-1795.
Worms in China
Introduction to intestinal worm infections (soil-transmitted helminths and schistosomiasis)
Documentation, training and reporting materials from the WHO Partnership for Parasite Control
PPC Newsletters. Check Issue 4: How to set up a de-worming program.
Detailed steps to set up a program, including parasitological surveys (has tables with cut-off levels based on intensity) Montresor, A., D. W. T. Crompton, et al. (2002). Helminth Control in School-Age Children: A Guide for Managers of Control Programmes, WHO.
Montresor, A., D. W. T. Crompton, et al. (1998). Guidelines for the Evaluation of Soil-Transmitted helminthiasis and schistosomiasis at the community level, WHO.
Maps of schistosomiasis in several countries: WHO (1987). Atlas of the Global Distribution of Schistosomiasis. (http://www.who.int/wormcontrol/documents/maps/country/en/)
Other materials on worms
All about schistosomiasis and helminth infections at the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative). Check out their publications list which includes some important papers on implementation and policy approaches. SCI is involved in the successful Uganda program.
A flyer linking de-worming to the Millenium Development Goals
Relation of school-aged to community-level infections: Guyatt, H. L., S.Brooker, et al. (1999). "Can prevalence of infection in school-aged children be used as an index for assessing community prevalence?" Parasitology 118:257-268.
On evaluation, and possible monitoring indicators: Gyorkos, T. W. (2003). "Monitoring and evaluation of large scale helminth control programmes." Acta Tropica 86: 275-282.
Information on Western Kenya
World Bank (2001) "Small Area Poverty Map of Kenya", World Bank Development Research Group.
The Poverty Action Lab) runs several evaluation studies in Western Kenya.
International Child Support Africa operates the de-worming program in Busia district.
New York Times article (July 28, 2004) briefly mentions the de-worming project.
For large datasets or long calculations, Stata can run substantially faster on a server. It also frees up your computer and minimizes the impact of power failures since servers tend to have backup power. To run a Stata do-file on a Unix/Linux server you can type
stata -b 'yourdofile.do' &
The -b tells Stata to run the do-file in batch mode. The ampersand & tells the server to keep running the job even if you are logged out – you can turn off your desktop while the server keeps working. Use statamp if your server offers the multi-processor version of Stata.
A useful twist is to ask the server for an email once the job is done, so you don't have to check all the time. Here one approach that puts "done subject" in the email's subject line and "done body" in the message body. Note the double ampersand && and the pipe |.
stata -b 'yourdofile.do' && echo "done body" | mail -s "done subject" [youremail @ yourhost .com] &
This can be combined with other technology. For instance, many cell phone carries allow you to send a SMS message by email. For T-mobile in the US this works by emailing [yourcellnumber @ tmomail .net]. You can use that email address to receive a text message from the server when your Stata job is done. To stop a Stata job that is already running first get a list of your current jobs under your user name and then terminate the job using its process ID number.
You can run multiple do-files either by re-running the Unix command for each file, or run them sequentially by using Unix to call a single do-file which in turn calls additional files (i.e. calling do-files from within a do-file). Unix can also attach a file when sending the email, for instance the log-file from your Stata output. Unix has various mail programs (mail, mailx etc) that are quite flexible, just search around for the correct syntax.
You can also invoke the Unix mail program from within your Stata do file. Use the following line in your Stata code (no ampersand & needed but note the "!" shell escape):
!echo "done body" | mail -s "done subject" youremail@yourhost.com
Now Stata will ask Unix to send you an email. This is useful for getting messages when your code reached a certain point in the Stata code but is not completely finished. You could also ask for multiple emails at various points to monitor progress, maybe by changing the body or subject line accordingly.
Generating use-able tables from Stata can be a painful experience. A particularly useful user-writte programs is Ben Jann's -estout- which allows to produce tables in text, table or tex format. Check the estout website for examples and details. Aside from regression tables, estout has subroutines to produce tables of almost everything – for instance estpost can tabulate summary statistics from summarize, tabulate and tabstat.
Latex users can fully leverage estout's flexibility. You can specify your own table headers and footers, and in this way use multicolumns and additional column headers. It is very worthwhile to spend time writing the code for producing exactly the table you want. If you have to make any changes you save the manual formatting.
Stata doesn't output pdf files directly but you can use the shell escape to compile latex files as pdf documents. Normally you would include tex files produced by Stata in your main file and then compile that file manually. But you can ask Stata to call pdflatex and do this for you. You end up with a readily pdf'ed file.
For this trick you need a functioning latex setup on your computer or server. The following example shows how to automatically compile a pdf with a tex table from Stata that was outputted with -estout-, and an eps graph. First, set up the tex file you want to compile, using \input to include your table and \includegraphics for your graph.
% Latex file myoutput.tex
\documentclass[11pt]{article}\usepackage{graphicx}\begin{document}\section{My table}\input{mytable.tex}\section{My graph}\includegraphics{mygraph.pdf}\end{document}
Then write your Stata program to produce the table mytable.tex and the graph mygraph.eps. At end of the do-file you will call pdflatex via the shell escape "!" to compile the document. If you save your graphs as eps files you will have to convert them to pdf first via epstopdf. The option -no-shell-escape is for pdflatex, not Stata.
* Stata do-file
sysuse auto
eststo mytab: reg mpg weight length
esttab mytab using "mytable.tex", style(tex) replace
scatter mpg length
graph export mygraph.eps, replace
!epstopdf mygraph.eps
!pdflatex myoutput.tex -no-shell-escape
Of course you can add anything your tex file handle and pick your favorite ways of including graphics and the like. You could even recompile your entire paper from within Stata although you might want to check your numbers carefully.
Until Stata 10 the do-file editor was just a basic text editor; from Stata 11 this has been much improved. You can also use an external editor to interact with Stata which has the additional advantage is that the editor will remain open if Stata crashes. The editor can also double for other programs (e.g. latex editing) and functions (comparing multiple versions of do-files).
There are many good editors out there. Friedrich Huebler maintains instructions for integrating various editors with Stata. I previously used WinEdt ($30 for students) and am switching to the open-source Notepad++ (NPP). Both editors have many other functions and can be programmed with macros.
Both provide syntax highlighting and automatic backup and can run Stata code straight out of the editor. NPP is free and has a number of useful plugins (most easily installed from within NPP) such as NppFTP which allows you to open remote documents directly in the editor. It also allows code-folding. On the other hand, WinEdt can automatically close pdf documents in Acrobat Reader which is useful if you're recompiling latex documents. It integrates easily with MikTEX and has a toolbar with latex symbols.