In 2015 the Lancet Commission on Global Surgery (LCoGS) argued that surgical care is important to national health systems along with the economic viability of countries. Gajewski and colleagues outlined how the Commission’s blueprint has been implemented in sub-Saharan Africa, including two funded research projects that were integrated into national surgical plans. Here...

Abstract The national-income accounts double-count investment, which enters once when it occurs and again in present value as rental income on added capital. double counting implies that GDP national overstate sustainable consumption. An alternative measure, ‘permanent income’, equals consumption the steady state but deviates from outside of because expensing gross investment applies to long-ru...

BACKGROUND on an individual level, lower-income has been associated with disability, morbidity and death. On a population level, the relationship of economic indicators with health is unclear. OBJECTIVE the purpose of this study was to evaluate relative fitness and frailty in relation to national income and healthcare spending, and their relationship with mortality. DESIGN AND SETTING secon...

Internation comparisons of average national incomes omit important information about leisure, home production, health, etc. They are also bedevilled by index number problems. This paper suggests ways of combining working hours and life-expectancy with income comparisons, and shows that the fixed-price indexes of real income, such as those in the Penn World Table, substantially understate the in...

Figure 1: United States, Year 2000 Median Household Income – on the U.S. National Level plot there are high income clusters on the East Side of Central Park, and in suburbs of Chicago but not its downtown neighborhood. In the San Francisco area we can identify Silicon Valley; the income in this small area is significantly greater than average (Data=Block Level; Global Shape=Cartogram based on H...

BACKGROUND Cardiovascular diseases and their nutritional risk factors--including overweight and obesity, elevated blood pressure, and cholesterol--are among the leading causes of global mortality and morbidity, and have been predicted to rise with economic development. METHODS AND FINDINGS We examined age-standardized mean population levels of body mass index (BMI), systolic blood pressure, a...

Mental health is likely to be influenced by contextual variables that emerge only at the level of the group. We studied the effect of two such group-level variables, within-state income inequality and alcohol tax policy, on symptoms of current depression and alcohol dependence in a US national sample, controlling for state-level and individual characteristics. A cross-sectional US national prob...

BACKGROUND Access to medicines is an important health policy issue. This paper considers demand structures in a selection of low-income countries from the perspective of public authorities as the evidence base is limited. Analysis of the demand for medicines in low-income countries is critical for effective pharmaceutical policy where regulation is less developed, health systems are cash constr...

AIM To examine the differences in subjective well-being among people with different household income. METHOD Data were obtained from the national survey conducted in June 2005, in which a representative sample of 896 participants were administered a questionnaire on several measures of subjective well-being as follows: happiness, life satisfaction, and satisfaction with different life domains...

Survey of Consumer Finances cross-sectional data from 1973 to 1996 are used in this article to examine Canadian trends in income inequality over the middle and later stages of the life course of a synthetic cohort born between 1922 and 1926. Using Gini coefficients, the findings show that income inequality decreases within a cohort as it grows old; that is, the Canadian retirement income system...