Without fundamental changes healthcare costs will continue to accelerate faster than the gross domestic product while consuming larger portions of individual and corporate incomes. Although the problems are widely acknowledged, we believe that there is an underappreciated defect driving these undesirable events. The essence of that defect is that the major portion of the money is outside the co...

BACKGROUND Significant growth has been observed in the field of foot and ankle research in recent years. However, bibliometric studies concerning the quantity and quality of articles published in foot and ankle journals are scarce. This study aimed to reveal the characteristics of national productivity in the field of foot and ankle research and to provide a general picture of foot and ankle re...

Suicides, hurricanes and economic crisis Director, Lopez Bernal et al. 1 detected a suicide rate trend, between 2005 and 2010, of a 0.3% decrease per month and, above this underlying trend, an 8% increase in Spanish suicide rates since the financial crisis using an interrupted time-series analysis. However, their model considers the economic crisis as an event that occurred suddenly in March 20...

The relation between economic growth and military resource allocations is complex. On the one hand, more rapid growth and a larger gross domestic product (GDP) increases resources available for military spending. On the other hand, larger allocations for military purposes may slow economic growth, to the extent that such allocations reduce non-military capital formation. Moreover, the scale of ...

The wealth of a country is assumed to have a strong non-linear influence on the life expectancy of its inhabitants. We follow up on research by Preston and study the relationship with gross domestic product. Smooth curves for the average but also for upper frontiers are constructed by a combination of least asymmetrically weighted squares and P -splines. Guidelines are given for optimizing the ...

This paper applies the 'time lag' method to a set of social and economic indicators, examining the development of Central and Eastern Europe since the first world war. Originally used to assess technology diffusion, this method allows comparison of levels of development between states and through a long period of time. It presents how many years have elapsed between achieving a certain level of...

Crime generates external costs for individuals and social costs for nations. This chapter reviews the dominant theoretical paradigms that underlie national estimates of the cost of crime and reviews the empirical methodologies that have been employed in the extant literature. The chapter closes with a brief review of empirical estimates of the costs of crime to crime victims. In the United Stat...

After the breakdown of the state socialism, a number of changes have occurred in the legal framework, as well as governmental policy, ownership, production, financing, and reimbursement of health care in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). However, the policy context in CEE makes priority setting a necessary step to ensure the efficient use of public funds for health. The problems with prioritizi...

We examine an economy whose consumers have different discount factors for utility, possibly not exponential. We characterize the properties of efficient allocations of resources and of the shadow prices that would decentralize such allocations. We show in particular that the representative agent has a decreasing discount rate when, as is usually posited, all of a group’s members have a constant...

Several international conservation organizations have recently produced global priority maps to guide conservation activities and spending in their own and other conservation organizations. Surprisingly, it is not possible to directly evaluate the relationship between priorities and spending within a given organization because none of the organizations with global priority models tracks how the...