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Additional file 3: List of heteroplasmy variants identified in subjects. The table lists the mitochondria heteroplasmy variants shortlisted in blood and DBS samples along with the %allele frequencies.

Additional file 1: Supplementary File 1. Supplementary File_Focus Group guides_24 Sept 2019_Clean. ���Community Perceptions on Immunizations: Focus Group Discussions���. These guides were designed based on our research questions and our objectives, and they aimed to facilitate the flow of the focus group discussions among the target groups.

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced countries to make difficult ethical choices, e.g., how to balance public health and socioeconomic activity and whom to prioritize in allocating vaccines or other scarce medical resources. We discuss the implications of benefit-cost analysis, utilitarianism, and prioritarianism in evaluating COVID-19-related policies. The relative regressivity of COVID-19 burdens and control policy costs determines whether increased sensitivity to distribution supports more or less aggressive control policies. Utilitarianism and prioritarianism, in that order, increasingly favor income redistribution mechanisms compared with benefit-cost analysis. The concern for the worse-off implies that prioritarianism is more likely than utilitarianism or benefit-cost analysis to target young and socioeconomically disadvantaged individuals in the allocation of scarce vaccine doses.

Education, general health, and reproductive health are key indicators of human development. Investments in these domains can also promote economic growth. This paper argues for the importance of human development related investments based on i) a theoretical economic growth model with poverty traps, ii) a literature review of evidence that different human development related investments can promote growth, and iii) own empirical analyses that aim at estimating the relative contribution of different human development indicators to economic growth across heterogeneous growth regimes. Our results suggest the following associations: (i) a one-child decrease in the total fertility rate corresponds to a 2 percentage point (pp) increase in annual per capita GDP growth in the short run (5 years) and 0.5 pp higher annual growth in the mid to long run (35 years), (ii) a 10% increase in life expectancy at birth corresponds to a 1 pp increase in annual GDP per capita growth in the short run and 0.4 pp higher growth in the mid to long run, and (iii) a one-year increase in average educational attainment corresponds to a 0.7 pp increase in annual growth in the short run and 0.3 pp higher growth in the mid to long run. By contrast, infrastructure proxies are not significantly associated with subsequent growth in any of the models estimated.

Per capita GDP has limited use as a well-being indicator because it does not capture many dimensions that imply a "good life," such as health and equality of opportunity. However, per capita GDP has the virtues of easy interpretation and can be calculated with manageable data requirements. Against this backdrop, a need exists for a measure of well-being that preserves the advantages of per capita GDP, but also includes health and equality. We propose a new parsimonious indicator to fill this gap and calculate it for 149 countries.

We explore future job creation needs under conditions of demographic, economic, and technological change. First, we estimate the implications for job creation in 2020–2030 of population growth, changes in labor force participation, and the achievement of plausible target unemployment rates, disaggregated by age and gender. Second, we analyze the job creation needs differentiated by country income group. Finally, we examine how accelerated automation could affect job creation needs over the coming decades. Overall, shifting demographics, changing labor force participation rates, reductions in unemployment to the target levels of 8 percent for youth and 4 percent for adults, and automation combine to require the creation of approximately 340 million jobs in 2020–2030.

By exploiting rich retrospective data on childhood immunization, socioeconomics, and health status in China (the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study), we assess the long-term effects of childhood vaccination on cognitive and educational outcomes in that country. To do so, we apply various techniques (e.g., propensity score and coarsened exact matching and correlated random effects) to different sets of conditioning variables and subsamples to estimate the average treatment on the treated effect of childhood vaccination. Our results confirm that vaccinations before the age of 15 have long-term positive and economically meaningful effects on nonhealth outcomes such as education and cognitive skills. These effects are relatively strong, with vaccinated individuals enjoying about one more year of schooling and performing substantially better later in life on several cognitive tests.

To assess the efficacy of Covid-19 non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) on infectious disease containment in Europe, we first use weekly 2015-20 data on the spread of influenza and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) to compare the 2019-20 season of these diseases with the previous five. Although the magnitude of results differs between countries, we document much stronger end-of-season declines in infections in the most recent outbreak than in the earlier ones, implying that they may be driven by NPIs implemented in 2020 to combat Covid-19. To test this conjecture, we use detailed country-specific weekly information on Covid-19 NPIs to estimate several panel models that relate NPI implementation to disease incidence across countries. Not only do certain measures significantly reduce the spread of Covid-19, they also curtail the spread of influenza and RSV. Nonetheless, although we identify workplace closures as a particularly effective measure, we find no evidence for the efficacy of other NPIs such as travel restrictions.

Visual inspection of world maps shows that coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is less prevalent in countries closer to the equator, where heat and humidity tend to be higher. Scientists disagree how to interpret this observation because the relationship between COVID-19 and climatic conditions may be confounded by many factors. We regressconfirmed COVID-19 cases 5per million inhabitants in a country against the country’s distance from the equator, controlling key confounding factors: air travel, distance to Wuhan, testing intensity, cell phone usage, vehicle concentration, urbanization, and income. A one-degree increase in absolute latitude is associated with a 2.6% increase in cases per million inhabitants (p value

Social impact bonds (SIBs) are an innovative financing mechanism for public goods. In a SIB, an investor provides capital to a service provider for a social intervention. The investor receives a return based on the outcome of the intervention relative to a predetermined benchmark. We describe the basic structure of a SIB and provide some descriptive statistics for these financial instruments. We then consider a formal model of SIBs and examine their ability to finance positive net present value projects that traditional debt finance cannot. We find that SIBs expand the set of implementable projects if governments are pessimistic (relative to the private sector) about the probability an intervention would succeed or if the government is particularly averse to paying costs associated with a project that does not generate offsetting benefits. As both these features are present in various public programs, we conclude that SIBs are a real innovation in public finance and should be considered for projects when traditional debt finance has been rejected.