Sustainable Development Goal 3.8 establishes the need to guarantee universal health care coverage, including financial risk protection and access to quality essential health care services. In order to achieve this goal it is fundamental to understand which mechanisms households are using to mitigate the negative effect of the financial shock and how these can increase their levels of poverty (income and multidimensional poverty).

This research aims to study how the levels of multidimensional poverty in eight LMICs change when households face health catastrophic payments. We selected four countries in Latin America and four in Africa, designed and computed Multidimensional Poverty Indices in each country and analysed the levels of poverty of households with and without catastrophic payments. Given that we are using longitudinal data, we estimated a fixed-effect model, with multidimensional poverty as the dependent variable and catastrophic payments as independent variables. This is a work in progress, and until now we have analysed two countries, Uganda and Mexico, countries with different levels of human, social and economic development, and health care systems. The results reveal that there is a positive effect of catastrophic payments on multidimensional poverty in the case of Mexico. In the case of Uganda, the longitudinal results are inconclusive. We did not find an association between facing catastrophic payments and multidimensional poverty, these results need more exploration. The preliminary results suggest that depending on a country's level of development, there is an association between multidimensional poverty and catastrophic payments.

Monica Pinilla-Roncancio is a Physiotherapist with a Master’s degree in Economics from Universidad del Rosario. She has also a Master’s degree in Health Economics, Policy and Law from Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands. She finished her PhD in Social Policy at the University of Birmingham, UK. From 2016 to 2018, she was as a Postdoctoral Researcher at Universidad de los Andes and currently is an Assistant Professor at the same university. She is the Co-director of Metrics and Policy at OPHI and has been working in OPHI since 2014. She coordinates the work in Latin America, East Asia and some countries in Africa and the Middle East. Her main research interests are disability, multidimensional poverty, inequality and health economics.

Paul Rodriguez Lesmes is an Assistant Professor at Universidad del Rosario (Bogotá, Colombia), graduated from University College London. His expertise is in applied microeconomics with an emphasis on the economics of health using tools from programme evaluation, 'natural' experiments, and structural models. His projects are in the areas of design of health systems, pharmaceuticals regulation, family economics, child development, water and sanitation, health-related behaviours, and infectious diseases. He has published in journals such as Economics and Human Biology, World Development. He has worked for the World Bank, IDB, the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS).