OBJECTIVE To analyze the spread of human American visceral leishmaniasis and identify the key municipalities for developing surveillance and control activities. METHODS The area of the study was composed of the 316 municipalities in the state of Sao Paulo belonging to the five health districts in which human American visceral leishmaniasis occurs, using data on autochthonous cases and deaths ...

OBJECTIVE This study investigated whether regional differences in perinatal mortality rates are related to distances to medical resources for perinatal care, such as the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU). METHODS Using the census for Japan in 2000, all municipalities in Japan were classified into four groups based on population size: municipalities of 1,000,000 people or more (Group 1), mun...

INTRODUCTION Environmental Macro-Area Five (EMA-5) is located in Rio de Janeiro. Their municipalities are suffering the consequences of rapid urbanization, especially after the discovery of large reserves of petroleum and natural gas (PNG) in the Campos Basin. OBJECTIVE To describe the socio-economic profile of the region and compare their indicators in space and time. METHODS This is an ec...

1. Purpose of the study Since 1995, the national government has repeatedly revised the Special Municipal Merger Law (so called (Kyu) Gappei Tokurei Ho). These revisions are aimed at promoting the consolidation of municipalities so that these municipalities could effectively cope with various local and regional issues, such as their financial crises and ongoing population aging (e.g. Sasaki 2004...

BACKGROUND Caries on children and adolescents in Denmark has declined significantly over the last 30 years. Our first analysis in 1999, however, disclosed huge inter-municipality disparities in mean DMFS values as well as in prevalence of caries on Danish children; that fluoride in the water supply and the length of the education of the mothers could explain up to 45% of the above-mentioned dis...

a r t i c l e i n f o This paper uses a Finnish policy intervention to study tax competition among local governments. Changes in the statutory lower limits to the property tax rates are used as a source of exogenous variation to estimate the responses of municipalities to tax rates in their neighboring municipalities. I do not find evidence of interdependence in property tax rates among Finnish...