The effects of health aid on child health promotion in developing countries: cross-country evidence

Although epidemiological knowledge in relation to child health has improved in the last few decades, around 3 million children die each year in developing countries from preventable diseases. The international development community views increased immunization coverage for children as an important step in eliminating or reducing these deaths. Many developing countries have very limited resources to tackle major health problems and have to rely on external finance. This article examines the impact of foreign aid devoted to the health sector on child health promotion in developing countries. Two proxies for child health promotion are used: (a) immunization against measles and (b) immunization against Diphtheria–Pertussis–Tetanus (DPT). A range of model specifications and panel data econometric techniques are applied to data covering the period 1990 to 2005. This article finds a positive and statistically significant link between health aid and the measures of child health promotion.     

How Can Social Enterprise Address Disadvantage? Evidence from an Inner City Community

This article examines the potential impact of social enterprise on disadvantage. The case study research involved participant observation over a 2-year period. Selection of cases was based on a preliminary typology for social enterprise and disadvantage was conceptualized using the European concept of social exclusion. This sees exclusion as multidimensional and relative to the standards of the society in which a person lives. The existing research literature suggests that the aggregate economic impact of social enterprise upon exclusion is marginal. This is a consequence of a mismatch between policy expectations and what is happening in the field. This study found that different forms of social enterprise impacted on exclusion in different ways. This article outlines these different impacts in order to open up a more balanced perspective on the potential and limitation of social enterprise in combating disadvantage.     

Inequality,Inflation, and their Impact on China's Investment Environment in the 1990s and beyond

Inequality, inflation, and unemployment have become increasingly explosive problems in today's China. In conjunction with an analysis of the spatial pattern of inflation, this paper examines the current trend of China's spatial disparities, in terms of economic output, real consumption, and real income, within inter-provincial, inter-regional and urban-rural framework. This paper also investigates the combined effect of the current high rate of inflation and spatial disparity on China's investment and business environment in the 1990s. Findings of this paper suggest that inter-regional inequalities in economic development and income distribution, especially since 1990, have been accelerated/exacerbated by high inflation, which appears to hit the poorer areas disproportionally. Given the reinforcement of disparity and inflation and the current upsurges of rampant localism, the investment and business environment of China in the 1990s, in terms of political and social unrest and economic profitability, will be severely undermined and will, therefore, become increasing uncertain. It is likely that this trend will extend beyond the millenium and last at least until the early 2000s.     

The Need for a Marketing Reform: The Wines of the Loire Region

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on how the French wine industry and, in particular, the wine-producing Loire region in France is affected by global and domestic factors. An overview of some of the vast regulations prevailing in the French wine industry that prohibit the wine producers to compete efficiently, especially with the wines from the “new world,” is provided. A Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) analysis is used as the tool to study the competitiveness of the French wine industry in general and the Loire region in particular. The French wine industry is too fragmented and subjected to too many controls and, as a result thereof, is not flexible enough to respond to market opportunities. French wines have the unique blend of “historical intangibles” of romance and mystery that have been part and parcel of wine for many centuries. This advantage is no longer a major competitive advantage, and the time has come to make decisions on which of the vast range of regulations are worthwhile to maintain to contribute positively to the best interests of the French wine industry.     

Differentiating ambiguity: an expository note

Ghirardato et al. J Econ Theory 118:133–173, 2004 propose a method for distinguishing between perceived ambiguity and the decision-maker’s reaction to it. They study a general class of preferences which they refer to as invariant biseparable. This class includes CEU and MEU. This note presents some examples which illustrate their results. Research supported by ESRC grant no. RES-000-22-0650. For comments and discussion we would like to thank Klaus Nehring and a seminar audience at ESEM, Vienna 2006.     

Rural-to-urban migration, human capital, and agglomeration

A new general-equilibrium model that links together rural-to-urban migration, the externality effect of the average level of human capital, and agglomeration economies shows that in developing countries, unrestricted rural-to-urban migration reduces the average income of both rural and urban dwellers in equilibrium. Various measures aimed at curtailing rural-to-urban migration by unskilled workers can lead to a Pareto improvement for both the urban and rural dwellers. In addition, the government can raise social welfare by reducing the migration of skilled workers to the city. Moreover, without a restriction on rural-to-urban migration, a government's efforts to increase educational expenditure and thereby the number of skilled workers may not increase wage rates in the rural or urban areas.     

Latino families report lower child injury rates than white families

Latino children have lower visit rates to emergency departments and primary care physicians than white children in the USA. Using a nationally representative household survey, this study asked whether parental report of injury was also lower for Latino children, after adjusting for demographic, socioeconomic, health status and health care access factors. Data were obtained on injuries for which medical advice or treatment was received from the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) from 1997 to 2003. Using the multistage probability design of NHIS, annual rates and adjusted odds of childhood injury report by race and ethnicity were calculated. Respondents reported lower rates of injury for Latino children (6.0 (95% CI 5.3-6.8)/100 person-years) than white children (13.4 (12.7-14.2)/100 person-years). Lower injury rates were mainly due to lower rates of sports injuries and accidental falls. Latino children had lower odds of reported injury than white children, even after adjusting for multiple factors (odds ratio 0.7; 95% CI 0.6-0.8). Lower odds of injury report among Latino children are independent of direct measures of demographic, socioeconomic, health status and health care access factors and indirect measures of acculturation including respondent language and country of origin. Potential explanations include lower exposure to risk, greater child supervision, reporting bias, differences in cultural attitudes toward seeking of health care and reduced health care access that cannot be explored in NHIS due to the form of the current questions. Further research is needed to investigate cultural differences in risk exposure, child supervision and seeking of injury care.     

ASEAN‐5 bond market development: Where does it stand? Where is it going?

Since the late 1990s' Asian crisis, ASEAN‐5 countries have expended considerable effort in developing their bond markets. However, the size of these markets relative to GDP has hardly changed. Can we explain this? And does it mean that domestic markets have not, in fact, developed? The article argues that bond market growth has been held back by a sharp fall in business investment, which has left firms with little need for bond borrowing. Even so, markets have developed in other ways, to such an extent that substantial amounts of foreign portfolio investment have begun to flow into ASEAN‐5 bonds. These developments have important ramifications. With the investor base growing and infrastructure investment likely to rise, ASEAN‐5 bond markets could expand rapidly, holding out the prospect that the region could finally achieve ‘twin engine’ financial systems in the near future.     

Adaptive forecasting in the presence of recent and ongoing structural change

We consider time series forecasting in the presence of ongoing structural change where both the time series dependence and the nature of the structural change are unknown. Methods that downweight older data, such as rolling regressions, forecast averaging over different windows and exponentially weighted moving averages, known to be robust to historical structural change, are found also to be useful in the presence of ongoing structural change in the forecast period. A crucial issue is how to select the degree of downweighting, usually defined by an arbitrary tuning parameter. We make this choice data-dependent by minimising the forecast mean square error, and provide a detailed theoretical analysis of our proposal. Monte Carlo results illustrate the methods. We examine their performance on 97 US macro series. Forecasts using data-based tuning of the data discount rate are shown to perform well.