Investments in the extension of health insurance coverage, the strengthening of public health services, as well as primary care and better hospitals, highlights the emerging role of healthcare as part of China’s new growth regime, based on an expansion of services, and redistributive policies. Such investments, apart from their central role in terms of relief for low-income people, serve to reb...

Pandemic-motivated lockdowns can expose firms to a vicious cycle: they cannot borrow enough keep paying wages and are forced dismiss workers; the dismissal of workers in turn reduces future productivity, sales, profits; those bleak prospects precisely what keeps from being able first place. To prevent this cycle, robust policy intervention is called for. In response COVID-19, debt finance —incl...

BACKGROUND Workplace injuries are common, cause significant morbidity for workers and have considerable economic impact. General practitioners can play an important role in facilitating early return to work, improving outcomes for all parties. OBJECTIVE This article provides guiding principles for the initial assessment and early treatment phase of injury with a primary focus on the rehabilit...

BACKGROUND The impact of global warming on population health is a growing concern and has been widely discussed. The issue of heat stress disorders and consequent productivity reduction among workers has not yet been widely addressed. Taiwan is an island straddling the Tropic of Cancer in the West Pacific and has both subtropical and tropical climates. As of 2008, the economy of Taiwan accounts...

The development of endophyte inoculants for agricultural crops has been bedevilled by the twin problems of a lack of reliability and consistency, with a consequent lack of belief among end users in the efficacy of such treatments. We have developed a successful research pipeline for the production of a reliable, consistent and environmentally targeted fungal endophyte seed-delivered inoculant f...

BACKGROUND There is currently a lack of reliable information on the exposures of residents and bystanders to pesticides in the UK. Previous research has shown that the methods currently used for assessing pesticide exposure for regulatory purposes are appropriate for farm workers 1. However, there were indications that the exposures of bystanders may sometimes be underestimated. The previous st...

Land degradation is a global problem that particularly impacts the poor rural inhabitants of low and middle-income countries. We improve upon existing literature by estimating the extent of rural populations in 2000 and 2010 globally on degrading and improving agricultural land, taking into account the role of market access, and analyzing the resulting impacts on poverty. Using a variety of spa...

OBJECTIVE To investigate the feasibility, costs and sample representativeness of a recruitment method that used workers with back injuries as the point of entry into diverse working environments. METHODS Workers' compensation claims were used to randomly sample workers from five heavy industries and to recruit their employers for ergonomic assessments of the injured worker and up to 2 co-work...

Psychologists have consistently documented people’s tendency to be overconfident about their own ability. We interpret workers’ confidence in their own skills as their morale, and investigate the implication of worker overconfidence on the firm’s optimal wage-setting policies. In our model, a wage contract both provides incentives and conveys to the worker the firm’s opinion about her ability, ...