We thank Dr. Hicken for her commentary (1) on our article regarding disparities in the distributions of blood pressure across racial/ethnic groups in the United States (2). She correctly places our results, which largely show that proximate risk factors are inadequate to explain disparities, in the context of a larger body of literature that suggests that broader social determinants of health m...

Article history: Received 18 April 2005 Received in revised form 20 March 2008 Accepted 7 May 2008 Available online 24 May 2008 Which government functions should be decentralized (resp. centralized) once lobbying behavior is taken into account?We find that the answer largely depends on how the interests of the regional lobbies are positioned with respect to the function to be decentralized (res...

Religion and theology are central ways that many people make sense of the world and their own place in that world. But the insights of critical studies of religion, or what is sometimes positioned as religious studies as opposed to theology, are scarce in disability literature. This article suggests some of the costs of this oversight and some of the benefits of including religion. First, this ...

Adoption of a multidimensional approach to deprivation poses the challenge of understanding the interaction between different dimensions. Are we concerned with the union of all those deprived on at least one dimension or with the intersection of those deprived on all dimensions? How does the approach of counting deprivations relate to approaches based on social welfare? The paper brings out key...

Abstract: The long-lasting “guns versus butter” argument reflects the fact that China has been experiencing a difficult choice in terms of improving the defense and social welfare sectors, and thus achieving fiscal sustainability. The result, however, is controversial. The present paper therefore re-examines the relationship between defense and social welfare by employing continuous wavelet ana...

Poverty and its etiology have been major subjects of concern for the social work profession throughout its history. This study focused on four causal attributions for poverty: social-structural, motivational, psychological, and fatalistic. More specifically, it examined the differences between social workers' and service users' perceptions of the causes of poverty. Participants were 401 service...