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Although China has made impressive progress towards Universal Health Coverage through the health system reform plan since 2009, chronic disease prevention and control implementations are still inadequate to meet the need at large. This study aims to quantify the acute and chronic care needs in China and examine the human resources for health and financial protection for the population to achieve Universal Health Coverage. The data on disability-adjusted life years, years lived with disability, and years of life lost in China were disaggregated from the Global Burden of Diseases Study 2019 by age and sex based on acute care need or chronic care need. An auto-regressive integrated moving average model was deployed to predict the supply gap of physicians, nurses and midwives from 2020 to 2050. Out-of-pocket health expenditure was compared among China, Russia, Germany, the US, and Singapore to examine the current status of financial protection. In 2019, conditions requiring chronic care accounted for 86.4% of all-cause, all-age disability-adjusted life years in China, while acute-care-need conditions accounted for 11.3%. Approximate 25.57% of disability-adjusted life years in communicable diseases and 94.32% in non-communicable diseases were caused by chronic care need conditions. Chronic care-need conditions accounted for more than 80% of both man and woman's disease burden. The proportion of disability-adjusted life years and years of life lost attributable to chronic care was greater than 90% in people aged 25 and up. The nurse and midwife supply will be in absolute shortage and unable to achieve effective universal health coverage effective coverage of 80% or 90% from 2020 to 2050, while the physician supply will be sufficient to maintain effective universal health coverage of 80% and reach 90% from 2036. The out-of-pocket health expenditure decreased with time but was still relatively higher than that of Germany, the US, and Singapore. The present study demonstrates the chronic care needs outweigh those for acute care in China. Nurse supply and the financial protection for the poor were still inadequate to achieve Universal Health Coverage. Better workforce planning and concerted actions on chronic care prevention and control should be taken to meet the population's chronic care needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how institutional differences matter to the quality of a nation’s jobs; job quality is conceived as a dimension of a national economy’s social performance and thus defined in accordance with civic principles. Focus is on the two archetypical varieties of capitalism, the United States and Germany. Using data from a 2009 telephone survey of U.S. and German workers, we find that the overall attainment of civic principles, as perceived by workers, is no different in Germany than in the United States, even though the German institutional environment should be more conducive to them. This is due to higher worker expectations in Germany and a tendency for employer practices to compensate for the weaker (liberal) institutional environment in the United States. Once these are controlled, German workers report substantially more positive outcomes. We find that institutional differences also matter in how various employer practices are adopted and hence have indirect as well as direct implications. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Analyses in comparative political economy have the potential to contribute to understanding health inequalities within and between societies. This article uses a varieties of capitalism approach that groups high-income countries into coordinated market economies (CME) and liberal market economies (LME) with different labor market institutions and degrees of employment and unemployment protection that may give rise to or mediate work-related health inequalities. We illustrate this approach by presenting two longitudinal comparative studies of unemployment and health in Germany and the United States, an archetypical CME and LME. We find large differences in the relationship between unemployment and health across labor-market and institutional contexts, and these also vary by educational status. Unemployed Americans, especially of low education or not in receipt of unemployment benefits, have the poorest health outcomes. We argue for the development of a broader comparative research agenda on work-related health inequalities that incorporates life course perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Strong societal requirements and consumer acceptance are the driving force of nanotechnology development. The necessity for qualified experts and strong demand on education in the multi-, trans- and interdisciplinary field of nanotechnology is a logical consequence of this driving force. There is the need for a comprehensive national skill-needs-identification study as a first step towards developing the appropriate workforce and to prevent any skill gap or shortage. This paper provides an analytical overview of skill needs and human resources development for the emerging fields of nanotechnology and gives recommendations for further research. Emphasis is placed on the role of vocational educational training (VET) in skill development for nanotechnology. Evidence review and secondary analysis of the literature are used as the methodological approach. A comparative analysis of approaches to nanotechnology workforce development in Germany and the United States is done. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper empirically analyzes the labor supply effects of two “making work pay” reforms in Germany. We provide evidence in favor of policies that distinguish between low effort and low productivity by targeting individuals with low wages rather than those with low earnings. We discuss our results more generally and with comparisons to the family-based tax credits in force in the US and the UK. For the evaluation of the policies, we apply a static structural labor supply framework and explicitly account for demand-side constraints by using a double-hurdle model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The "big trade-off," described by Arthur Okun some thirty years ago, is back again: equality or efficiency, or to put it differently, modern highly developed economies and societies have to choose between the Scylla of income inequality and the Charybdis of unemployment. Furthermore, it looks like the continental European economies—foremost Germany and France—sided with more egalitarian ends accepting higher unemployment while the liberal economies such as the United States and the United Kingdom chose higher inequality for lower unemployment. In this paper it is argued that the trade-off is not a supply-side necessity to maintain work effort in a situation of incomplete contracts, but is a politico-economic issue of particular interest groups seeking rents. However, unlike in Mancur Olson's seminal approach, it is not the trade unions that are forming distributional coalitions on the labor market, but rather the meritocracy which is happy to use Keynesian-type demand management to advance their material interests by pursuing a "meritocratically optimal rate of unemployment" (MORU). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose - How many hours per week should workers in the USA and Germany spend at their paying jobs? The present paper aims to address this question by constructing policymakers' reaction functions capable of modelling the optimal length of working time as a function of the relevant labour market variables. Design/methodology/approach - The study is based on a counterfactual policy experiment. Given a policymaker's loss function and a structural model of the labour market alternative specifications of reaction functions are defined where the response coefficients indicate how policymakers should react to any news in the labour market in order to stabilise employment and wages. Findings - The results suggest that simple rules perform quite well and that the advantages obtained from adopting an optimal control-based rule are not so great. Moreover, the analysis emphasises the success of the wage-based rule and of the employment-based rule in the USA and Germany, respectively. Research limitations/implications - The study is based on a counterfactual policy experiment, which perhaps limits its operational value. Practical implications - Labour market authorities might stabilise employment and wages by implementing policy rules. Originality/value - The paper proposes a policy rule to capture the dynamics of the weekly working hours. According to the rule in the paper the length of the workweek is an inverse function of the deviation between the actual and potential employment level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1980 and 2000, average actual working hours per adult rose by 234 in the United States while falling by 170 in Germany. These trends imply that growth in per capita GDP may be a poor indicator of trends in average economic well-being and that trends in money income inequality may misrepresent trends in the inequality of economic well-being. Is greater inequality in the US the incentive that motivates greater work effort by Americans? Differentials in average usual working hours largely arise from differences in workforce participation — particularly among women and older men. Except for the extreme lower tail, the distribution of usual working hours of prime age males is essentially identical and constant in Germany and the US — which implies that the greater inequality of earnings in the US has no noticeable incentive effect on the labour supply of workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines labor market mobility of Hispanic immigrants in the United States and immigrants from recruitment countries in Germany. The data comes from two similar longitudinal samples conducted in Germany and the United States. This allows for a comparison of labor mobility between immigrants and natives in both countries. The comparison reveals a higher degree of mobility on all levels among immigrants in the United States. Over time, Hispanic immigrants were able to reduce the income gap compared to natives while this gap increased in Germany. This higher degree of mobility can be traced back to two factors: A higher human capital among Hispanic immigrants and a more liberal labor market regime in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article comments on the evolution of workers' politics in New York from the end of the 18th century to a climax in the labor upsurge of 1850. The problem with this analysis, as with most other studies of mid-19th century New York, is that it makes insufficient allowance for the severe discontinuity which massive immigration intruded into the development of the labor movement in the late 1840s. By 1850, only a few of New York's workers had experienced the full sequence of developments. The European born workers, who came to dominate the new labor force, brought other traditions with them to New York. They were able to tap other sources of political ideas which did not have their roots in the American experience and often had only the most tenuous connections with the American experience of the early 19th century. German artisans came to New York with high levels of skills and brought their own artisanal traditions with them. Some of these were rooted in the ancient craft traditions of Europe where guilds and journeymen's associations had defined the artisan's world. Even in Germany, however, the guilds were a fading memory by mid-century and German artisanal traditions were in a state of ferment. It was the influence of the French Revolution which had first led to the abolition of guilds in western Germany, and it was from the experience of the French labor movement as well as their own that German artisans developed their responses to the new capitalist order.

The Federal Republic of Germany and the U.S. are most similar for mobility from father's to son's first occupation. We believe this reflects the fact that transmission of resources from the family of origin to the ports of entry into the labor market is the same for the two societies. Thus similar nuclear family structures will have a similar effect on education level and on starting position. The labor market, however, is a more complex mechanism; it reacts to individually achieved resources and moreover has very different features from one society to another, owing to legislative provisions or various hierarchical structures that link job changes to specific career trajectories. This is an effect not only of the differences in hierarchical structure as observed in the case of France and the Federal Republic, but also of differences in the correlation between education and entry positions and further mobility chances in different societies or in different contexts. Movements within the occupational hierarchy and positional privileges as one goes up the occupational ladder seem to be much more structured in the Federal Republic. The American and, in part, the French system are characterized by primarily symmetric mobility, with cases of upward career mobility balanced out by cases of downward mobility.