China's health care reform: A tentative assessment

China has recently unveiled an ambitious new health-care reform plan, entailing a doubling of government health spending as well as a number of concrete reforms. While the details of the plan have not yet been completely announced, we offer a preliminary assessment of how well the reform is likely to achieve its stated goal of assuring every citizen equal access to affordable basic health care. The reform is based on three fundamental tenets: strong role of government in health, commitment to equity, and willingness to experiment with regulated market approaches. Within this framework, the reform offers a number of laudable changes to the health system, including an increase in public health financing, an expansion of primary health facilities and an increase in subsidies to achieve universal insurance coverage. However, it fails to address the root causes of the wastes and inefficiencies plaguing China's health care system, such as a fragmented delivery system and provider incentives to over-provide expensive tests and services. We conclude that China should consider changing the provider payment method from fee-for-service to a prospective payment method such as DRG or capitation with pay-for-performance, and to develop purchasing agencies that represent the interests of the population so as to enhance competition.     

Capitalism and democracy in the 21st century: a Kaleckian interpretation of a Schumpeterian problem

The paper reinterprets Schumpeter's views on the dynamic effects of taxation, as originally expressed in Crisis of the Tax State, from a Kaleckian perspective. In light of Schumpeter's rejection of Keynesian and Marshallian approaches to taxation, the paper argues that a recently developed Kaleckian approach provides an appropriate basis from which to analyse the effects on the business cycle of balanced changes in the structure of taxation. It is shown that, under certain shifting assumptions, increases in the taxation of wages or profits will stimulate investment and attenuate the amplitude of the business cycle. Ultimately, the shifting of taxes reduces to a conflict over income shares. The changing distribution of income in the United Kingdom in recent years suggests that investment is likely to remain sluggish unless there is a significant reversal of income shares. This may give rise to increasing economic and political tensions into the 21st century.     

Religious adherence and county economic growth in the US

We estimate a Barro-type conditional convergence model using religious adherence data from the American Religious Data Archive to analyze independent effects of church adherence rates on economic growth in the United States at the county-level. Per capita income growth is modeled as a function of initial per capita income, initial human capital stock, and a set of control and related variables including religious adherence, religious diversity, and regional indicator variables. We also investigate the independent effects of three main denominations, namely Catholics, Evangelical Christians, and Mainline Christians, on county economic growth. Our results indicate that the religious adherence in general is significantly greater than zero and not beneficial for US county income growth. We find mixed results for effects of various denominations.     

Resolving Unfair Distribution of Income through Transforming the Mode of Economic Development

传统经济发展方式对收入分配领域中的许多不合理因素产生了强支撑，是我国收入分配差距日益扩大的深层原因。本文通过对“三个转变”的梳理，分析了传统经济发展方式的内在缺陷及其在居民劳动报酬、行业垄断、社会福利体系建设和通货膨胀等方面的负面影响。最后，就如何从转变经济发展方式入手缓解收入分配不公提出了针对性的意见和建议。     

马来西亚的农村经济发展策略

本文主要探讨1957年独立以来,马来西亚农村经济发展策略的演变及其成效,并总结出几点有益的启示,包括注重提高农民收入,提高单位农业收入和发展农村工商业等。     

收入分配、医疗资源与人口健康:一个跨国研究

收入分配与人口健康的关系是一个争论已久的问题。本文在总结各种理论假说和以往实证研究的基础上,使用新的、质量较好的跨国面板数据,重新检验了收入分配与人口健康的关系。本文的分析重点有二:一是收入分配对人口健康的滞后影响;二是医疗资源在收入分配与人口健康的相关关系中所起的作用。本文的主要发现是,收入不均对人口健康的确有不利影响,但这种不利影响需要10年或更长的滞后期才能充分显现出来,这种滞后性是以往使用固定效应模型的跨国研究未能检测到收入不均与人口健康具有负相关关系的主要原因。此外,医疗资源(特别是初级医疗资源)人均拥有量对人口健康有积极作用;医疗资源有可能通过某种不可观察固定因素对收入分配与人口健康的关系发生影响。这些发现有助于澄清关于收入分配与人口健康关系的争论,对医疗政策也有重要参考价值。     

长春市低收入家庭的住房供应问题

住房问题是全社会普遍关注的问题，特别是低收入家庭住房问题更是全社会最突出的问题，它直接关系到人们生活水平的高低，对整个社会经济也产生巨大的影响。     

Fish as the “bank in the water” – Evidence from chronic-poor communities in Congo

Small-scale fisheries in developing countries are often perceived as being a low-productivity and backward informal sector. As a result they are rarely considered in poverty reduction programmes and rural development planning. In this paper, we investigate the dual role of fish as a food and cash crop through data collected in river fisheries in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Fishing in this very remote rural region of DRC is operated both by men and women, as part of a household multiple activity livelihood strategy. The data shows that poor households rely heavily on fishing for their supply of protein-rich food, in particular through women’s subsistence catches. Fishing also appears to be the main source of cash-income for the majority of households, including local farmers. Based on these findings and a review of the literature, the paper argues that small-scale fisheries can play a fundamental role in local economies, especially in remote rural areas where they strengthen significantly the livelihoods of people through their role in both food security and cash-income generation.