Enteric fever is a systemic illness with varying presentation. It is an important infectious disease in developing countries and also in industrialized countries where many migrants reside. Enteric fever can result in complications in different organ systems and delay in identification and prompt treatment can be fatal. The important gastrointestinal complications of enteric fever include hepat...

We implement novel tests of general relative purchasing power parity (PPP), defined as a long-run unit elasticity of the nominal exchange rate with respect to relative national prices, allowing for potentially permanent real exchange rate shocks. The finite-sample properties of the estimators used are analyzed through Monte Carlo analysis, allowing for country heterogeneity, cross-sectional dep...

The U.S. health care system suffers from a number of problems. Almost 46 million individuals were uninsured in 2007, an increase of 6 million people since 2001. Employer-based coverage, the primary source of health insurance across the nation, continues to erode. Costs continue to rise and bear primary responsibility for the nation’s bleak long-term fiscal outlook. While the United States spend...

OVERVIEW OF FRANCE F rance is an industrialized country with a large agricultural sector. Its population in 1991 totaled 57 million. According to the Constitution of 1958, France is organized as a parliamentary democratic republic. Separation of legislative and executive powers, multiplicity of political parties, and respect for the Constitution and the Human Rights Declaration are the guaranti...

Trade misinvoicing should be seen as an element of de facto capital account openness. Traditional explanations for trade misinvoicing—high custom duties and weak domestic economies—are less persuasive in a world of high growth emerging markets that have low trade barriers. We construct a 53-country data set over a 26 year span, covering both industrialized and developing countries, to study the...

International systems are frequently offered as models for health care reform. This study, focusing on preventive services for children and pregnant women in six industrialized countries, finds that a broad range of preventive services can be provided through health care systems with divergent financing and cost containment, utilizing multiple entry points into the health care system, and emplo...

Using panel structural VAR analysis and quarterly data from four industrialized countries, we document that an increase in government purchases raises output and private consumption, deteriorates the trade balance, and depreciates the real exchange rate. This pattern of comovement poses a puzzle for both neoclassical and Keynesian models. An explanation based on the deep-habit mechanism is prop...

Cross-country observations on the effects of population growth are used to show why differences in rates of growth in working-age population may be a key to understanding differences in economic performance across industrialized countries over the period 1975–1997 versus 1960–1974. In particular, we argue that countries with lower rates of adult population growth adopted new capital-intensive t...

Despite being a developed and industrialized country with one of Europe‟s most booming economies, Germany ranks only 33rd in Gallup‟s World Poll on happiness, well below the United States, the United Kingdom, and many other first-world countries.1 This is particularly perplexing when one considers Germany‟s highly progressive taxation system and its residents‟ extraordinary access to public goo...

Energy issues have become increasingly important for our world. It could be plausibly argued that energy will shortly be the single most important problem for industrialized countries, on the same footing as food, water and overpopulation, for the world as a whole. On a timescale of decades, our world may face an inevitable exhaustion of nonrenewable energy supplies. Even at the present time, e...