FOREWORD This report has been prepared by the Directorate General for Agriculture of the European Commission in the framework of the analyses carried out in preparation for the approaching EU enlargement. It is aimed at providing a clear picture of the possible impact of different enlargement scenarios on agricultural markets and on farm incomes in the Central and Eastern European Countries (CE...

What happens if HIPC debt relief resources are not additional? We seek to answer this question by quantifying the impact of debt service payments and aid flows in crosscountry growth and investment regressions. Based on the regressions we assess the likely impact of debt relief with and without changes in the aid flows. The result is that one-for-one changes in debt service payments and officia...

IMPORTANCE Recent governmental and private initiatives have sought to reduce health care costs by making health care prices more transparent. OBJECTIVE To determine whether the use of an employer-sponsored private price transparency platform was associated with lower claims payments for 3 common medical services. DESIGN Payments for clinical services provided were compared between patients ...

Empirical studies on pharmaceutical pricing across countries have found evidence that prices vary according to per capita income. These studies are typically based on survey data from a subset of countries and cover only one year. In this paper, we study the international trade and price of insulin by using detailed trade data for 186 importing countries from 1995 to 2013. With almost 12,000 ob...

Today we return to the idea of differential privacy as a tool to be wielded in mechanism design. We will prove a simple, but remarkable theorem that deviates from our normal intuition as mechanism designers. Typically, we think of social welfare as a special objective function – we can always use the VCG mechanism to optimize social welfare, but in general, there do not exist truthful mechanism...

20 Years of German Unification: Evidence on Income Convergence and Heterogeneity We analyse the convergence and heterogeneity of living standards between East and West Germany since unification. Based on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP), we compare total individual income of permanent adult residents, including retirees and the unemployed, of East and West Germany over the fift...

We analyse the convergence and heterogeneity of living standards between East and West Germany since unification. Based on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP), we compare total individual income of permanent adult residents, including retirees and the unemployed, of East and West Germany over the fifteen years for which data are available. Using a fixed effects vector decompositio...

We analyse the convergence and heterogeneity of living standards between East and West Germany since unification. Based on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP), we compare total individual income of permanent adult residents, including retirees and the unemployed, of East and West Germany over the fifteen years for which data are available. Using a fixed effects vector decompositio...

Background and Objectives: Informal payment in the health settings is a significant challenge facing the health system, with consequences such as inequity in access to healthcare services, distrust to health care system, and dissatisfied customers. Detailed identification of the nature of the problem is perquisite to developing relevant overcoming strategies. Given that, this study aimed at pro...