健脑俱乐部悄然兴起

现年63岁的作家琳达·巴克林（Linda Hale Bucklin）看见自己所在的社区新开了一家“健脑俱乐部”，当场办了张卡。现在，她每周去那里三次，通过电脑学习一个“视觉处理”课程，她觉得这个课程帮助她更快地找到汽车钥匙，并提高了自己的网球技巧。     

A multidimensional analysis of poverty in China from 1991 to 2006

Most studies have reported non negligible improvements for China in terms of poverty during the last three decades. However, this result is potentially hampered by two limitations. First, it may be contingent to the specific choices made regarding the poverty line and the poverty indices used for the analysis. As a consequence, it may collapse if one uses alternative poverty lines or poverty measures. Second, it results from a focus on the sole monetary aspects of poverty. As income does not cover all facets of well-being and since the relationship between these two concepts are quite fuzzy, it may be worth using a broader view of well-being, hence opting for a multidimensional approach of poverty analysis. In the present paper, these two issues are addressed using multidimensional stochastic dominance procedures on the joint distribution of income, education and health in seven Chinese provinces.     

SWITZERLAND: GROWTH OF GOVERNMENT, GROWTH OF CENTRALISATION

Switzerland has a tradition of decentralised government, decentralised tax setting and direct reference to the voters through referendums. Such mechanisms should give rise to lower taxes, better provision of public goods and higher economic growth. However, these mechanisms have not been effective in the last 30 years at preventing the growth in government spending and centralisation. This is partly because of the consensus in favour of centralisation that exists among institutionalised politicians. The performance of the Swiss economy since 1970 has consequently been dismal. Real per capita post-tax incomes have been stagnant. There is now an opportunity for the growth of centralisation to be reversed.     

Impact of behavioral health problems on access to care and health services utilization

Access to specialists for treatment of behavioral health problems has become restricted in this era of capped budgets and reductions in Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement. Patients with multiple mental health problems may face additional barriers to obtaining needed health care services. The study's aim was to measure the impact of behavioral health problems on access to care and health services utilization for veterans and non-veterans and to determine the contribution of health system characteristics in the prediction of self-reported health services utilization. The study sample consisted of Vietnam veterans who participated in both the Vietnam Drug User Study (September 1971 Army discharges) and the Vietnam Era Study (25-year follow-up) (N=642), as well as a non-veteran cohort (N=197).