This is a paper I (Robert) co-authored as a graduate student in economics at M.I.T. After my NSF fellowship funds ran out in Summer, 1978, I joined the Health Care Delivery Systems Project as a research assistant. I had acquired an interest in development economics, and this looked like an interesting project to further it, and indeed it did. I mainly helped with the statistical and computational end of things using SPSS.

I appeared as co-author for this and several other papers put out under the Project's auspices. This is one of the two I was the principal author of. A modified version was published later in Food Policy* with John as the principal author. My main contribution was to insist the supplementary feeding program in Egypt be compared to some well-defined and well-documented standard. I thought this would make our assessments more objective and also serve as an educational tool for the people in Egypt administering such programs. John came up with the indexes and did most of the non-statistical analysis. The text I imagine more reflects his style than mine.

I joined the Project after the immense job of formulating and administering the questionnaire the Project was oriented around was completed. Keypunching the resulting data was completed as well, although keypunching and other data errors had yet to be ferreted out.

The project was administered through the economics department with Richard Eckaus as the official principal investigator. John ran things day to day, and Dick checked in from time to time. John and George were both in the political science department. I had previously worked with people from the political science department when I worked on a project studying inflation with Stan Fischer and others. They always had an interesting point of view.

This was the first paper I wrote using the formatting assistance of the computer. I think it was some official IBM product, though I forget what it was called. I particularly liked the way it helped format tables and handle footnotes. John Maglio, the local computer consultant, was an immense help in referring me to various software packages and helping me understand what they and SPSS were trying to tell me.

Economics Paper Index