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Occupational choice is a significant input into individuals' health investments, operating in a manner that can be either health-promoting or health-depreciating. Recent studies have highlighted the potential importance of initial occupational choice on subsequent outcomes pertaining to morbidity. This study is the first to assess the existence and strength of a causal relationship between initial occupational choice at labor entry and subsequent health behaviors and habits. We utilize the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to analyze the effect of first occupation, as identified by industry category and blue collar work, on subsequent health outcomes relating to body mass index, obesity, alcohol consumption, and physical activity in 1999-2005. Our findings suggest that initial occupations described as craft, operative, and service are related to higher body mass index and obesity later in life, while labor occupations are related to higher probabilities of smoking later in life. Blue collar work early in life is associated with increased probabilities of obesity and smoking, and decreased physical activity later in life, although effects may be masked by unobserved heterogeneity. Few effects are found for the effect of initial occupation on alcohol consumption. The weight of the evidence bearing from various methodologies, which account for non-random unobserved selection, indicates that at least part of this effect is consistent with a causal interpretation. These estimates also underscore the potential durable impact of early labor market experiences on later health.

This paper investigates how legal cannabis access affects student performance. Identification comes from an exceptional policy introduced in the city of Maastricht in the Netherlands that discriminated access via licensed cannabis shops based on an individual's nationality. We apply a difference-in-difference approach using administrative panel data on course grades of local students enrolled at Maastricht University before and during the partial cannabis prohibition. We find that the academic performance of students who are no longer legally permitted to buy cannabis substantially increases. Grade improvements are driven by younger students and the effects are stronger for women and low performers. In line with how cannabis consumption affects cognitive functioning, we find that performance gains are larger for courses that require more numerical/mathematical skills. Our investigation of underlying channels using course evaluations suggests that performance gains are driven by an improved understanding of the material rather than changes in students' study effort.

One of the consequences of rapid economic growth and industrialization in the developing world has been deterioration in environmental conditions and air quality. While air pollution is a serious threat to health in most developing countries, environmental regulations are rare and the determination to address the problem is weak due to ongoing pressures to sustain robust economic growth. Under these constraints, natural gas, as a clean, abundant, and highly-efficient source of energy, has emerged as an increasingly attractive source of fuel, which could address some of the environmental and health challenges faced by these countries without undermining their economies. In this paper, we examine the impact of air pollution on infant mortality in Turkey using variation across provinces and over time in the adoption of natural gas as a cleaner fuel. Our results indicate that the expansion of natural gas infrastructure has caused a significant decrease in the rate of infant mortality in Turkey. In particular, a one-percentage point increase in the rate of subscriptions to natural gas services would cause the infant mortality rate to decline by 4 percent, which could result in 348 infant lives saved in 2011 alone. These results are robust to a large number of specifications. Finally, we use supplemental data on total particulate matter and sulfur dioxide to produce direct estimates of the effects of these pollutants on infant mortality using natural gas expansion as an instrument. Our elasticity estimates from the instrumental variable analysis are 1.25 for particulate matter and 0.63 for sulfur dioxide.

We provide a theoretical and empirical analysis of the link between financial and real health care markets. This link is important as financial returns drive investment in medical research and development (R&D), which, in turn, affects real spending growth. We document a “medical innovation premium” of 4–6% annually for equity returns of firms in the health care sector. We interpret this premium as compensating investors for government-induced profit risk, and we provide supportive evidence for this hypothesis through company filings and abnormal return patterns surrounding threats of government intervention. We quantify the implications of the premium for the growth in real health care spending by calibrating our model to match historical trends, predicting the share of gross domestic product (GDP) devoted to health care to be 32% in the long run. Policies that had removed government risk would have led to more than a doubling of medical R&D and would have increased the current share of health care spending by more than 3% of GDP.

Serpil Ertik erkundet am Beispiel geflüchteter Menschen mit Behinderung, inwieweit die sozialen Kategorien „Migration“ und „Behinderung“ wechselseitig Einfluss auf den Zugang zu zentralen Lebensbereichen nehmen und welche Barrieren und Herausforderungen sich daraus ergeben. Nach einer Erläuterung der wesentlichen theoretischen Konzepte werden im Kern der Arbeit qualitative Interview mit Fachkräften aus der Geflüchteten- und der Behindertenarbeit und zwei Asylbewerber*innen mit einer Behinderung zur Beantwortung der Ausgangsfrage ausgewertet und auch intersektional analysiert. Die Untersuchungsergebnisse zeigen deutlich, dass der rechtliche Status der Geflüchteten die Zugangsmöglichkeiten zu zentralen Lebensbereichen deutlich erschwert. Prekäre Lebenssituationen in den Gemeinschaftsunterkünften, fehlende Gesundheitsversorgung, Ausschluss aus Integrationskursen und in der Folge soziale Ausgrenzungen sind die Konsequenz der asylrechtlichen Regelungen. Durch diese strukturellen Diskriminierungen wird ein Behinderungsprozess reproduziert. Sprache und Zuschreibungen der aus der Mehrheitskultur stammenden Mitarbeiter*innen konstituieren weitere Machtverhältnisse und Ausschlüsse von Geflüchteten mit Behinderung. Als Konsequenz führen diese Bedingungen zu einem von Fremdbestimmung und Abhängigkeit geprägten Leben, das in deutlichem Widerspruch zu den Anforderungen der UN-BRK steht.

Zijad Naddaf fragt danach, wie sich Grenzen und die darin eingelagerte Erzählung von Flucht und Migration durch Praktiken und Diskurse formieren. Vor dem Hintergrund der Flüchtlingszuwanderung und mit Bezug auf Foucault werden Gesamtstrategien der Europäischen Union zur ‚Verteidigung ihrer Gesellschaft‘ diskutiert, unter anderem am Beispiel der Grenzbearbeitungsagentur Frontex konkretisiert sowie das Konstrukt der Europäischen Union als Ordnung herstellendes Dispositiv vorgestellt. Mit Bezug auf solche Formierungen werden die Wege der Fliehenden zu einem Kampffeld, in dem sich sowohl die Autonomie von Migration als auch die beständigen und repressiven Weg- und Raummarkierungen zeigen, die sich bis auf das Meer ausdehnen.

If two partners smoke, their quit behavior may be related through correlation in unobserved individual characteristics and through common shocks. However, there may also be a causal effect whereby the quit behavior of one partner is affected by the quit decision of the other partner. If so, there is a spousal peer effect on the decision to quit smoking. We use data containing retrospective information of Dutch partnered individuals about their age of onset of smoking and their age of quitting smoking. We estimate mixed proportional hazard models of starting rates and quit rates of smoking in which we allow unobserved heterogeneity to be correlated across partners. Using a timing of events approach, we determine whether the quitting-to-smoke decision of one partner has a causal effect on the quitting-to-smoke decision of the other partner. We find no evidence of substantial spousal peer effects in the decision to quit smoking. Apparently, love conquers all but nicotine addiction. Copyright © 2017 John WileySons, Ltd.

We investigate the effect of reputational motivation on output in a scenario of overprovision of medical treatment. We assume that physicians differ in their degree of altruism, enjoy being perceived as good but, dislike being perceived as greedy. We show that better reputational motivation unambiguously reduces the costs of healthcare provision and the magnitude of overprovision which in turn raises patient benefits.

This paper examines possible determinants of physicians' emigration from a wide set of developing countries, using count data analysis. We find that standard-of-living, health-infrastructure, and workload in source countries play important roles in such medical brain drain. Also the emigration culture, governance and colonial history of the sending country affect such expatriation. Better health-infrastructure, work environment as well as strict anti-emigration policies can help reduce such important brain-drain for developing countries.

In this paper, we investigate the long-run effects of World War II on socio-economic status (SES) and health of older individuals in Europe. Physical and psychological childhood events are important predictors for labor market and health outcomes in adult life, but studies that quantify these effects in large samples that cover entire diverse populations are still rare. We will analyze data from SHARELIFE, a retrospective survey conducted as part of the Survey on Health, Aging, and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) in 2009. This survey provides detailed data on events in childhood including those during the war as well as several measures of exposure to war shocks such as experience of dispossession, persecution, combat in local areas, and hunger periods for over 20,000 individuals in 13 European countries. We find that exposure to the war itself, and even more importantly to individual-level shocks caused by the war such as hunger periods, significantly predict old-age outcomes at older ages.

The Box-Cox (1964) transformation model (BC model) is widely used to examine various problems. The likelihood function under the normality assumption is misspecified, and the maximum likelihood estimator (BC MLE) cannot in general be consistent. However, under the “small sigma” assumption described in Bickel and Doksum (1981), the BC MLE can be consistent. It is, therefore, necessary to test whether this assumption is satisfied when the BC model is used. In this paper, we propose a new test of whether or not the BC MLE can be used based on the estimator proposed by Nawata (2013). We then analyze length of hospital stay for type 2 diabetes patients hospitalized for educational programs about managing diabetes at home. A dataset of 970 patients collected from 27 general hospitals in Japan is used.

Current legislative proposals consider amendments to child labor laws for U.S. agriculture. Similar amendments, however, have been unsuccessful previously. Using the National Agricultural Workers Survey, we show that child labor is still substantial in the modern U.S. despite some decreases over time, and argue that the lack of success of recent child labor policy initiatives has left some young workers vulnerable. We use the limited data that are available to examine determinants of farm and off-farm child labor in the U.S. and to consider correlations between child labor and participation in educational and welfare programs at the family level. As a majority of literature on child labor stems from international contexts, this research lessens that gap by presenting the U.S. case from the perspective of a key industry sector while informing ongoing discussion pertaining to possible revisions of child labor laws and providing support for continued and expanded data collection.

Purpose: To identify the relative risks of catastrophic healthcare expenditures for different types of health need, and the impact of such expenditure on household coping strategies. Methods: Using data from a household survey in West Bengal, the risks of incurring ‘catastrophic' healthcare expenditures relating to hospitalization, ambulatory care, chronic illness and delivery were estimated using a logistic regression. A regression model was then used to estimate the relationship between the incidence of catastrophic expenditures at different threshold levels and an ‘Aggregate Coping Index', constructed using principle components analysis. Results: The proportion of households in which a member required hospitalization who experienced catastrophic healthcare expenditure was more than three times that for those where a member had a chronic illness but was not hospitalized. However, in the logistic regression model the likelihood of catastrophic expenditure relating to chronic care was around twice that for hospitalization. Catastrophic expenditure on care, irrespective of the precise threshold we adopt, was significantly correlated with our coping strategy index. Conclusions: Catastrophic health spending is an important problem for the population in West Bengal. More attention is needed on the poverty-inducing effects of long-term expenditures on chronic illness, given that existing schemes only address hospitalization.

The HIV/AIDS epidemic is one of the greatest challenges facing economic and social development in sub-Saharan Africa. Women of reproductive age (15 - 49) have the greatest risk and prevalence of HIV in this region. Increased female vulnerability to HIV stems from limited access to health care and lack of autonomy to make decisions regarding sexual health and education. Using Demographic and Health Surveys data from seven sub-Saharan African countries, this paper finds important associations between women's own sexual health knowledge, sexual empowerment and HIV status. Women who know more about sexual health knowledge in terms of contraceptive methods, fertility, and menstrual cycles are more likely to report greater control over their sexual lives compared to women with no understanding of sexual health. Also, we find that sexual empowerment is negatively associated with being HIV positive for urban and uneducated women. Hence, this paper indicates a possible direction for future policies aiming at lowering HIV incidence and fostering female autonomy in sub-Saharan Africa.

This paper uses matched employee-employer data from the British Workplace Employment Relations Survey (WERS) 2004 to examine the determinants of employee job anxiety and work-related psychological illness. Job anxiety is found to be strongly related to the demands of the job as measured by factors such as occupation, education and hours of work. Average levels of employee job anxiety, in turn, are positively associated with work-related psychological illness among the workforce as reported by managers. The paper goes on to consider the relationship between psychological illness and workplace performance as measured by absence, turnover and labour productivity. Work-related psychological illness is found to be negatively associated with several measures of workplace performance.

We estimate the effects of declining smoking and increasing obesity on mortality in the United States over the period 2010–2040. Data on cohort behavioral histories are integrated into these estimates. Future distributions of body mass indices are projected using transition matrices applied to the initial distribution in 2010. In addition to projections of current obesity, we project distributions of obesity when cohorts are age 25. To these distributions, we apply death rates by current and age-25 obesity status observed in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, 1988–2006. Estimates of the effects of smoking changes are based on observed relations between cohort smoking patterns and cohort death rates from lung cancer. We find that changes in both smoking and obesity are expected to have large effects on U.S. mortality. For males, the reductions in smoking have larger effects than the rise in obesity throughout the projection period. By 2040, male life expectancy at age 40 is expected to have gained 0.83 years from the combined effects. Among women, however, the two sets of effects largely offset one another throughout the projection period, with a small gain of 0.09 years expected by 2040. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s13524-013-0246-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

As mobile phone ownership rates have risen dramatically in Africa, there has been increased interest in using mobile telephones as a data collection platform. This note draws on two largely successful pilot projects in Tanzania and South Sudan that used mobile phones for high-frequency data collection. Data were collected on a wide range of topics and in a manner that was cost-effective, flexible, and rapid. Once households were included in the survey, they tended to stick with it: respondent fatigue has not been a major issue. While attrition and nonresponse have been challenges in the Tanzania survey, these were due to design flaws in that particular survey, challenges that can be avoided in future similar projects. Ensuring use of the data to demand better service delivery and policy decisions turned out to be as challenging as collecting the high-quality data. Experiences in Tanzania suggest that good data can be translated into public accountability, but also demonstrate that just putting data out in the public domain is not enough. This note discusses lessons learned and offers suggestions for future applications of mobile phone surveys in developing countries, such as those planned for the World Bank’s “Listening to Africa” initiative.

Using data from Ontario, we study the extent to which education mitigates the realized work-disabling effects of permanent occupational injury. Focusing first on the rates of post-injury employment, our results suggest that education has a strong disability-mitigating effect in cases of knee and shoulder injuries, but a smaller effect where workers have experienced permanent back or wrist/finger injuries. A comparison of pre- and post-injury occupations then reveals that education mitigates disability not so much by facilitating job shifting, but rather by enabling the individual to return to the pre-injury occupation. These latter results suggest that education may mitigate disability somewhat indirectly by facilitating the accumulation of occupation-specific human capital that, in turn, compensates for the effects of physical impairment.

Despite rapid economic growth, gender disparities in women’s economic participation have remained deep and persistent in India. What explains these gender disparities? Is it poor infrastructure, limited education, or the composition of the labor force and industries? Or is it deficiencies in social and business networks and a low share of incumbent female entrepreneurs? This note analyzes the spatial determinants of female entrepreneurship in India in the manufacturing and services sectors. It finds that good infrastructure and education predict higher female entry shares. Gender networks also influence women’s economic participation, as strong agglomeration economies exist in both manufacturing and services. A higher female ownership among incumbent businesses within a district-industry predicts a greater share of subsequent female entrepreneurs. Moreover, higher female ownership of local businesses in related industries (similar labor needs, input-output markets) predicts greater relative female entry rates.

While most economists accept that, in the long run, open economies fare better in aggregate than closed ones, many fear that trade could harm the poor. African countries, for example, have realized significant improvements in trade liberalization in recent decades, yet Africa remains the poorest continent in the world. It seems that the large gains expected from opening up to international economic forces have been limited in Africa, especially for poor people. Drawing on the findings of a recently published working paper (Le Goff and Singh 2013), this note argues that the benefits of trade are not automatic, but rather depend on accompanying policies aimed at developing the financial sector, promoting primary education, and improving governance. This accompanying policy agenda allows people to take advantage of the opportunities offered by freer trade, by reallocating resources away from less productive activities to more promising ones. Trade liberalization therefore should not be implemented on its own, but with the necessary complementing policies.

This report from the field describes the design, implementation, and early evaluation results of the Healthy Weight Collaborative, a federally-supported learning collaborative to develop, test, and disseminate an integrated change package of six promising, evidence-based clinical and community-based strategies to prevent and treat obesity for children and families.

The article deals with the situation in the area of social services in Slovak Republic and general concept of the evaluation from the perspective of diff erent authors. It also defines the objectives of the evaluation, types of evaluation and different kinds of assessment. Article is also focused on evaluation of social services as an important part of social work. It describes theoretical concepts, which have signifi - cant impact on the evaluation of social services in practise. Article also describes the „evaluation tree“, which branches represent diff erent focuses and orientations of many authors of evaluation theories.

Given the limitation of life expectancy at birth as an indicator of survival as regard its comparison across population and over time, life potential per capita is suggested as an alternative to overcome such limitation. An illustration of this alternative indicator in case of Indian states presents a case for consideration as it makes a robust comparison of survival well being with consideration of the age structure of the population and the prevailing regime of survival.

Intervention policies for HIV/AIDS differ in their approaches, and acceptability to control the spread of the epidemics. We introduce a theoretical model to depict how several factors may determine an individual's maximum willingness to pay for any HIV/AIDS policy. Heterogeneous baseline risks, through risky sexual activities, operate so that those individuals with higher exposure to risky activities are inclined to pay for any policy that reduces the risk. However, given the epidemiological and economic context of a geographic region, the perceived effectiveness of a policy implies that it will reach some level of risk reduction outcome and then, not contribute any further to the control of epidemics. What comes into play is whether individuals observe the risk change generated by the policy and implications for behavioral changes. Finally, we also introduce altruistic motives as a determinant of the WTP.

Credit constraints are central to development economics theory. However, there is scant direct evidence that supports the existence of such constraints. Traditional tests observe how consumption changes after an unexpected income shock. Such changes can also result from myopic behavior or precautionary savings. This study uses a randomized control trial to explore the effects of enabling savings as a tool to smooth consumption, keeping income constant. The study focuses on community instructors in Mexico. Instructors have to deal with idiosyncratic shocks and shocks related to settling in to new communities. For a group of instructors participating in this study, administrators switched 34 percent of monthly payments to quarterly payments. The switch reduced abandonment of service from 23 to 18 percent. This behavior is consistent with the standard model with credit constraints. It is not consistent with a model without credit constraints or one with myopic individuals.

This article investigates Schkade and Kahneman's (1998) maxim that ‘Nothing in life is quite as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it.’ This article shows that whilst becoming unemployed hurts psychologically, unemployment has a greater impact on happiness if the person also regards it as an important event that took place in the last year. This finding, particularly if it is replicated for other domains, such as health and income, will have important implications for how we think about the impact of objective circumstances on well-being and about well-being more generally.

A utilitarian social planner who maximizes social welfare assigns the available income to those who are most efficient in converting income into utility. However, when individuals are concerned about their income falling behind the incomes of others, the optimal income distribution under utilitarianism is equality of incomes.

Este estudio investiga el impacto de las recientes crisis en Argentina (incluyendo la grave recesión de 2001-2002) en la salud y la educación. La estrategia de identificación se basa en la covarianza entre los cambios en el PIB regional y los resultados por provincia en términos intertemporales e interprovinciales. Estos resultados indican efectos significativos e importantes de las fluctuaciones agregadas en la mortalidad materna e infantil y en el bajo peso al nacer, así como un patrón contracíclico aunque no significativo para las tasas de matrícula. Finalmente, el gasto público provincial en salud y educación se correlacionan con la incidencia del bajo peso al nacer y la matriculación escolar de los adolescentes, con peores resultados ante una disminución del PIB., Centro de Estudios Distributivos, Laborales y Sociales (CEDLAS)

Lean means creating more value for customers with fewer resources, by minimizing waste. Although traditionally this concept is applied in manufacturing, the Lean management improvement principles can be also applied in the case of educational institutions. This paper presents three case studies of implementing Lean in UK and USA universities that can be useful examples for implementing Lean in any university environment

The basis of the economic implications in the Sacred Tradition of the Ortodox Church consist in the socio-economic realities that confronted the Church from the very beginning, besides the endeavours made by the Holy Fathers to give responses, both subjective (through written works, rules, etc.) and objective (Synod’s decisious, liturgical collections, etc.) to material developments. Economics in the Church’s Tradition is a miraculous one, dependent on Divinity, which achieves maximum effectiveness by filtering the economic deeds of any kind in following and fulfilling the rules of Christian Ethic.

This study is to investigate the determinants of healthcare information amongst women in Taiwan aged between 25 and 69 years, and the association with cervical cancer screening.A two-stage estimation model was adopted for this investigation. In the first stage, the determinants of healthcare information were estimated by the OLS method, with the predicted values of the healthcare information then being linked to the decision to undergo Pap-smear testing. The nationwide survey dataset was obtained from the 2002‘Health Promotion of Knowledge, Attitudes and Practice' (HPKAP) in Taiwan, provided by the Bureau of Health Promotion. A total of 9,106 individuals were included in the analysis. The results reveal that the variations in the level of healthcare information are an important contributory factor to the utilization of cervical cancer screening in Taiwan. Therefore, in addition to providing free screening under the NHI, it is important for the healthcare authorities to place greater effort into strengthening the knowledge and information on cervical cancer screening and Pap-smear testing, for those who are currently less informed, so as to enhance the overall efficiency of the screening program.

Mediale Berichte über angebliche oder tatsächliche Lebensmittelskandale schmälern das Vertrauen der Bevölkerung in die Sicherheit ihrer Ernährung und die Garantie ihrer Gesundheit. Obwohl Lebensmittel heutzutage im Vergleich zu früher aus naturwissenschaftlicher Sicht signifikant sicherer und qualitativ deutlich besser geworden sind, steht dieser Tatsache das gesunkene Vertrauen in diese Güter diametral entgegen. Hinsichtlich dieser Risikowahrnehmung reicht es nicht aus, der Bevölkerung die Mechanismen der Risikobewertung und des Risikomanagements inklusive der Lebensmittelüberwachung lediglich zu erklären und hochqualitative Produkte auf dem heimischen Markt bereitzustellen. Von Bedeutung ist vielmehr zu verstehen, warum Menschen zu solchen Einschätzungen gelangen und wie man die ihnen zugrunde liegenden psychologischen Mechanismen dafür einsetzen kann, ein besseres Verständnis für tatsächliche Risiken zu generieren. Im folgenden Artikel wird anhand von drei aktuellen Beispielen, Dioxinfunden in Eiern, Pflanzenschutzmittelresten in Lebensmitteln und der EHEC-Krise in Deutschland 2011, erläutert, wie Risiken wissenschaftlich bewertet sowie subjektiv empfunden werden und welche Anforderungen daraus für eine adäquate Risikokommunikation entstehen. Medial reports on supposed or real scandals about food decrease the trust of citizens in the safety of nutrition and the guarantee of their health, not only in Germany and Europe. Although, from a natural scientific point of view, food is significantly safer and obviously qualitatively better nowadays in comparison to former times. This fact is diametrically opposed to the decreased trust in these goods. Regarding this type of risk perception it is not sufficient just to explain risk assessment and risk management including food monitoring to the public and to provide high quality products on the local market. It is in fact important to understand why people develop such estimations and how these psychological mechanisms can be utilized for a better understanding of real risks. The following article illustrates on the basis of three current examples, contamination of eggs with dioxin, pesticide residues in food and the German EHEC crisis in 2011, how risks are scientifically assessed and how they are perceived personally and, hence, which requirements arise for adequate risk communication.

Power is a key factor that contributes to the industrialization and the economic growth of a country. It is one of the most important infrastructures on which the development of various economic sectors of a country depend. Availability of reliable and quality power at affordable rates is very crucial. It helps to make the domestic market competitive globally and thus enhance the quality of life for people. The nuclear, hydro, and thermal energy are the prominent sources of electricity generation in India. In India, the power industry is huge. The Central Ministry of Power is the main authority responsible for the overall development of electrical energy. The ministry is in charge of planning, formulating policies, monitoring and implementing power projects, processing of projects for investment decision, and enacting legislation with regards to power generation, distribution, and transmission. In order to attract foreign investments into the power industry of India, the government has announced several policies and has taken initiatives from time to time. The most important amongst all the policies announced by the government is the enactment of the Electricity Act. The act was enacted in 2003. The act mainly aims to solidify the existing laws relating to the generation, distribution, transmission, and trading of electricity, promote healthy competition among companies in the power sector; and ensure that there is a supply of electricity to every nook and corner of the country. The Electricity Act also aims to rationalize electricity charges, promote efficient and environmentally favorable policies. Moreover, the Central Ministry of Power has set an ambitious plan of “power for all by 2012†. While the power sector in India has witnessed a few success stories in the last 4-5 years, the road that lies ahead of us is dotted with innumerable challenges that result from the gaps that exist between what’s planned versus what the power sector has been able to deliver. This document highlights and quantifies some of these gaps and attempts to analyze the problem.

The fraction of GDP devoted to health care in the United States is the highest in the world and rising rapidly. Recent economic studies have highlighted the growing value of health improvements, but less attention has been paid to the efficiency costs of tax-financed spending to pay for such improvements. This paper uses a life cycle model of labor supply, saving, and longevity improvement to measure the balanced-budget impact of continued growth in the Medicare and Medicaid programs. The model predicts that top marginal tax rates could rise to 70 percent by 2060, depending on the progressivity of future tax changes. The deadweight loss of the tax system is greater when the financing is more progressive. If the share of taxes paid by high-income taxpayers remains the same, the efficiency cost of raising the revenue needed to finance the additional health spending is $1.48 per dollar of revenue collected, and GDP declines (relative to trend) by 11 percent. A proportional payroll tax has a lower efficiency cost (41 cents per dollar of revenue averaged over all tax hikes, a 5 percent drop in GDP) but more than doubles the share of the tax burden borne by lower income taxpayers. Empirical support for the model comes from analysis of OECD country data showing that countries facing higher tax burdens in 1979 experienced slower health care spending growth in subsequent decades. The rising burden imposed by the public financing of health care expenditures may therefore serve as a brake on health care spending growth.

Migration continues to be a very important income diversi¯cation strategy, es- pecially for poor populations in developing countries. However, while there has been much analysis on the economic consequences of migration for migrants and the receiving regions, whether internal migration improves or deteriorates human development is not easy to determine. This papers applies a recently de- velopment analytical framework that allows to calculate the HDI for subgroups of a population. We use this approach to calculate the HDI by internal migra- tional status to assess the di®erences between the levels of human development of internal migrants compared to non-migrants, and also across countries as well as by urban and rural areas. An empirical illustration for a sample of 16 low and middle income countries shows that, overall, internal migrants slightly achieve a higher level of human development than non-migrants. The results further show that di®erences in income between migrants and non-migrants are generally higher than di®erences in education and life-expectancy. Disag- gregating the analysis by urban and rural areas reveals that urban internal migrants are better o® than urban non-migrants and rural migrants are better o® than rural non-migrants.

Change is abroad across the land, as often destructive as constructive. No one is immune. The financial crisis is perhaps the most obvious wave of change, but as the title of this paper (and also the title of a song popular in America between World I and World War II1) suggests, the most pervasive, seductive, and subversive changes are fueled by the view of the wider world provided by the internet with its blogs and social networks. How ‘ya gonna keep‘em satisfied with a second-class life (or worse) after they have seen the luxuries and freedoms of the wider world? Knowledge is power, and frightening amounts of people-power can be marshaled via the internet. Tyrants fall and royal families quake in the face of so much focused intentionality. But even as freedoms are recovered, what are all the unemployed to do with that freedom, especially in those countries in which the average age is between late teens and early twenties – kids, really, with no prospects of the good life? Add to this the coming shortage of food, drinking water, and fuel and the resulting upward spiral of costs for life’s necessities, further imposing hardship on new members of ‘the internet generation.’ Social and political catastrophes are to be expected. What can the countries in ‘Europe’s southern neighborhood’ do to respond, to be proactive in the face of massive and predictable changes?

This paper investigates the impact of diabetes on employment based on the 2005 National Health Interview Survey in Taiwan using a recursive bivariate probit model. The findings show that diabetes has a negative and significant effect on employment, and that the magnitude is larger for men than for women. The results of this study also suggest that neglecting the potential endogeneity of diabetes will lead to an underestimation of the negative impact of diabetes on employment.

What economic roles, if any, should government pl ay? This is still an incompletely analyzed issue that different individu als - depending on their ideologies, rent- seeking opportunities, and analytical abilities - m ay answer very differently. To advance its analysis, this paper recognizes that human rational ity (as empirically testable cognitive abilities) is bounded unequally across individuals, and is therefore a unique scarce resource that markets and government allocate in significant ly different ways. The results conflict with ideologies of both socialism and classical lib eralism, but agree with two puzzles of recent economic history and with ideological compromises in actual economic policies.

This is a simple illustration of using the concept of poverty gap in determining the rich and in turn the middle class given the consumption expenditure distribution of a population. Based on the transfer principle from rich to the poor it assumes complete alleviation of poverty. Such an exposition of defining affluence or rich conveys an understanding of inequality on one hand and extent of richness on the other

Measuring inequalities in child undernourishment with the help of the most popular concentration index (CI) has its own limitation in valuation and comparison. This is an attempt at contrasting a set of improved inequality measures against the conventional CI to comment on their robustness. In the process, it raises a need for revisiting the attainment-inequality relationship in health outcomes

The goal of this research is to provide an analysis of the development of the Republic of Croatia and 110 selected countries in terms of human resource development index components and the components of the Technological Achievement Index. Developmental lags of the Republic of Croatia were determined by the bird’s eye view method in terms of the observed developmental indicators, and suggestions were provided for their development. The impact of the analysed indicators and their components on the economic growth of the Republic of Croatia and the selected countries was established by regression analysis. The paper provides possible developmental guidelines for certain components. The results of the research proved that the Human Resources Development Index is insuffi cient in the analysis of economic development, as well as the existence of the expected correlation between trained human resources, which enable technological progress, and economic growth of a country. Taking into consideration the correlation between the growth of the Human Resources Development Index, Research Capacity Index, Technology and Innovation Index, and the Ability to Absorb Knowledge and Technology Index and economic growth, which was determined by the application of a model, Croatia has to make additional investments in the growth of human capital and labour productivity in order to reduce developmental lags.

The obesity rate in the United States has risen significantly in the past few decades. While a number of economic causes for the rise in obesity have been explored, little attention has been on the role of health insurance per se. This paper examines obesity in the context of a model where health insurance status can influence body weight. We attempt to isolate the effects of ex ante moral hazard, where people with health insurance may change their behaviors towards weight control. We use data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System from 1993 to 2002 to determine the potential effect of having health insurance on measures of body weight. In our analyses, we control for a variety of confounding factors that may influence body weight and address the endogenous nature of health insurance. Our results show evidence that having insurance is associated with higher body mass (particularly for those above the poverty threshold) and an increased probability of being overweight. However, we find no evidence that having insurance affects the probability of being obese.

This article analyzes the relationship between abortion and female education. It provides new empirical evidence from sub-Saharan Africa to show that more liberal abortion policies are associated with a higher female secondary school enrollment. It is assumed in the model that easier access to abortion decreases probability of dropping out of school for a female child in the case of an occasional pregnancy. As a consequence, it enhances parental investments in human capital of their female offspring and helps to reduce the gender gap in education, as consistent with the evidence.

The use of epidemiologic research designs and analytical methods is common in dietetics research. Food and nutrition professionals who seek to perform evidence-based practice or participate in research design, analysis, and communication need skills in the essentials of epidemiology. This is one of a series of monographs on research methodology that addresses these needs and supports the goals of the Board of Editors of the Journal of the American Dietetic Association to further enhance competency and skills. This monograph focuses on statistical approaches for univariate analyses used with the primary observational study designs associated with epidemiology. Tables illustrating the presentation and interpretation of these results are included.

This paper tests whether one partner’s happiness significantly influences the happiness of the other partner. Using 10 waves of the British Household Panel Survey, it utilizes a panel-based GMM methodology to estimate a dynamic model of life satisfaction. The use of the GMM-system estimator corrects for correlated effects of partner’s life satisfaction and solves the problem of measurement error bias. The results show that, for both genders, there is a positive and statistically significant spillover effect of life satisfaction that runs from one partner to the other partner in a couple. The positive bias on the estimated spillover effect coming from assortative mating and shared social environment at cross-section is almost offset by the negative bias coming from systematic measurement errors in the way people report their life satisfaction. Moreover, consistent with the spillover effect model, couple dissolution at t + 1 is negatively correlated with partners’ life satisfaction at t.

The demographic reality and the changes of population compositions, families and communities from the urban and, respectively, the rural area contain several challenges for reconfiguring the social policies in the future. This study proposes an approach of the Romanian social policy in the context of ageing, of changes and risks it generates from the lifecycle perspective. First, the main arguments are reviewed that motivate such an approach by highlighting the modification trends of risks and opportunities during the individuals’ lifetime. Next, an analysis is realised with respect to the opportunities of adjusting the social policy to the risks associated to the main stages of the lifecycle: years of growing and learning (childhood and adolescence); the period of forming families and the working life years; the post-active period. A special emphasis is laid on taking into account the differences between men and women. The study contains recommendations for policies oriented on diminishing the risks during the lifecycle in the context of ageing.

Recently, Canada has been experiencing a severe nurse shortage. Although increasing numbers of registered nurses (RNs) to meet the ever-growing challenge to nursing resources in Canada is a serious matter, a four-year baccalaureate degree will be required in most Canadian provinces as an initial education for entry into the nursing practice by 2010. However, Quebec does not follow this new educational trend of Canadian nursing. Based on the latest educational trend of Canadian RNs, the main purpose of this study is to find the differences in patterns of education-based wage differentials between Quebec and the rest of Canada by measuring monetary returns from a four-year baccalaureate degree compared to a three-year diploma. This paper examines the substantial differences between Quebec and the rest of Canada in discounted lifetime earnings by an empirical analysis using the 2001 Canadian Census.

Organic farming is not new to Indian farming community. Several forms of organic farming are being successfully practiced in diverse climate, particularly in rain-fed, tribal, mountains and hill areas of the country. Among all farming systems, organic farming is gaining wide attention among farmers, entrepreneurs, policy makers and agricultural scientists for varied reasons such as it minimizes the dependence on chemical inputs (fertilizers; pesticides; herbicides and other agro-chemicals) thus safeguards/ improves quality of resources, and environment. It is labour intensive and provides an opportunity to increase rural employment and achieve long term improvements in the quality of resource base.Organic farming has received considerable attention in India in the recent past. In India, the per cent area under organic farming is only 0.03 per cent of the total area under agriculture when compared to Austria (11.30%), Switzerland (9.70%) and Italy (7.94%) according to SOEL Survey, February 2003. Some of the major organically produced agricultural crops in India include crops like plantation, spices, pulses, fruits, vegetables and oil seeds etc

Risky-asset prices are conventionally modeled as "fully (information-) revealing". Much less work has been done on how prices get to reveal information. Following the "noisy-prices", rational-expectations approach, our answer focuses on the micro-foundations of information acquisition and the role of human capital in asset, or risk, management. We derive testable propositions on how education and other determinants of asset management affect its intensity, risky-asset demand, and portfolio returns. We derive related insights concerning determinants of the level and volatility of asset prices and equity premiums. Using micro-level data on portfolio choices, we find that education raises both the portfolio share of risky assets and overall portfolio returns, while a measure of the opportunity cost of asset management has the opposite effects. Our results indicate a non-trivial return to education in generating non-wage income. They suggest that educational attainments directly affect the distribution of income as well as earnings.

The GDP per person in India doubled from US $ 260 in 1980 to US $ 538 in 2003. However, growth has not been evenly distributed among India’s various sectors, and the composition of GDP has changed. Agriculture used to be the leading sector, but its GDP share dropped from 57 per cent in 1950 to 22 per cent in 2002 and is estimated to 18.6 percent during 2006-2007. More than 65 per cent of India’s population is rural, and 58 per cent of the rural labour force works in agriculture. These people are mainly marginal farmers or small farmers that accounts for less than one third of the country’s total farming area. In India the diversities in economic and social development have different capacities of poverty reduction for a variety of reasons. In this study the standard of living index of a household has been classified by adding scores assigned to various items and the total score representing the SLI of the household. The Lorenz curve can be obtained if we have the value of SLI for each household of the population. Broadly the SLI of a household has been classified by adding scores assigned to various items and the total score representing the SLI of the household. Though the total score of SLI has been tabulated with the help of raw data, the exact score for SLI of a household can be computed.