Value of innovation for hematologic malignancies

Background:

Several novel drugs are dramatically improving both lifespan and quality-of-life of patients with blood cancers.

Aim:

Prolonged disease duration and increased treatment costs for hematologic malignancies impose a relevant economic burden onto healthcare services, despite the low incidence of blood cancers. Therefore, an appropriate paradigm for valuing ‘innovation’ is urgently required in order to refine pricing and reimbursement decisions. Cost-per-QALY-gained is still the standard metric for assessing the ‘incremental’ value of new drugs; however, the high number of ‘comparator’ therapies and the huge variety of treatment sequences make plain two-treatment comparisons sub-optimal, while multiple-treatment and multiple-sequence comparisons require complex and less-transparent decision models. A repository of standard backbones for decision models might allow benchmarking and comparability among cost-effectiveness analyses; however, an international effort is required to build it up.

Results:

Deontology recommends that hematologists act in optimizing healthcare resources while preserving patient–physician alliance, but clinical practice guidelines do not support doctors in balancing cost against clinical outcomes. Decision models of chronic blood cancers unexpectedly proved that cost might be an appropriate value for innovation if treatments avoided severe toxicity and further lines of treatments, despite the eventually long duration of treatment and the competing risk of death due to comorbidity and old age.

Conclusion:

The improved transparency of decision models allows sharing of relevant structural and analytic parameters (i.e., time horizon, comparator treatments, hierarchy of end-point, assumptions, source of data, sub-group analyses) by stakeholders, physicians and patients, making health economics a noble ‘translator’ of values for innovation.     

The catering industry as a source of campylobacteriosis in Europe—A review

Thermotolerant species of Campylobacter are the causative agents of the human illness called campylobacteriosis. The number of confirmed cases of human campylobacteriosis in the European Union followed a significant increasing trend in the period 2008–2012, and continued to be the most commonly reported zoonosis with 214,779 confirmed cases in 2013; the notification of human campylobacteriosis is today mandatory in most European Member States. Recent reports from the European Food Safety Authority have identified catering (catering services, restaurants, hotels, pubs, bars) as the most frequently reported setting for Campylobacter infection (EFSA and ECDC, 2015). As can be evinced from the analysis of the scientific literature, the quality of raw meat has been identified as a parameter of fundamental importance, but the contribution of incorrect food handling procedures is by no means negligible. In fact, poor hygiene during poultry meat preparation as well as inadequate cooking and cross-contamination between raw meat and ready-to-eat food were found to be the main causes for the spread of campylobacteriosis related to the catering industry.     

我国食品安全满意度研究综述

近年来,随着人们对食品安全问题的关注程度越来越高,食品安全满意度领域的研究也日益增加。本文围绕食品安全满意度内涵的界定、食品安全满意度现状、影响因素以及提升食品安全满意度状况的策略研究四个方面,对我国食品安全满意度的研究进展进行了文献回顾,并指出已有研究存在的不足,旨在后续促进专家学者对该领域的进一步研究。     

美国食品安全监管职权体系及其借鉴意义

文章着力分析了美国食品安全监管体系的核心机构即美国食品药品安全监管局的职权,尤其阐述了美国《食品安全现代化法》颁布以来美国食药监管的职权扩展扩充配置.同时,文章概括该局与联邦政府其他部门、地方政府及外国政府分工协作的关系和各自职权中集权性、统一性、主导性、专业性管理的特点,介绍了美国食品监管体系的财政经费来源和相关法律体系安排,并分析论述了美国食品安全监管体系对于我国食品监管体系改革的借鉴意义.     

会计变更对企业盈余管理影响的实证研究

会计变更会对企业的利润产生影响,而目前我国企业对会计变更的披露还不够完善,这为企业通过会计变更来操纵企业利润提供了方便。本文对会计变更对企业盈余管理的影响进行了实证研究,指出会计变更对企业财务状况和经营成果有着重大影响,会计变更信息披露不规范的现状亟待改善。     

A behavioural model of traffic congestion: Endogenizing speed choice, traffic safety and time losses

Conventional economic models of traffic congestion assume that the relation between traffic flow and speed is a technical one. This paper develops a behavioural model of traffic congestion, in which drivers optimize their speeds by trading off time costs, expected accident costs and fuel costs. Since the presence of other drivers affects the latter two cost components and hence the Nash equilibrium speed, a ‘behavioural’ speed-flow relationship results for which external congestion costs include expected accident costs and fuel costs, in addition to the time costs considered in the conventional model. It is demonstrated that the latter in fact even cancel in the calculation of optimal congestion tolls. The overall welfare optimum in our model is found to be off the speed-flow function, and off the average and marginal cost functions derived from it in the conventional approach. This full optimum requires tolls to be either accompanied by speed policies, or to be set as a function of speed. Using an empirically calibrated numerical simulation model, we illustrate these qualitative findings, and attempt to assess their potential empirical relevance.     

资本监管与银行最优资本结构

资本监管已成为现代商业银行监管体系的核心,而现有研究对资本监管的重要性缺乏系统的理论研究。基于此,本文从MM理论出发,逐步分析并得出:银行自身经营的特殊性、银行作为一般企业所追求的企业价值最大化行为以及银行作为特殊企业所得到的银行安全网保护等因素使得银行形成不断提高最优资产负债率和降低资本充足率的内在机制,逐步分析不同情形下的银行最优资本结构,进而说明资本监管对于维系银行经营的稳健性和审慎性以及减少银行破产而导致的负外部性等方面的重要作用。     

物流运输配送系统（WLTMS）的开发与研究

采用系统工程分析、算法实现与集成化软件系统相结合的研究方法,设计并开发了物流运输配送系统(WLTMS)。以系统建模、路径及装载优化和仿真评估为核心技术,使之可与GIS、GPS、EDI技术、电子商务等结合应用,实现准时制配送(JIT)。系统采用三层分布式体系结构,并在确定参与WLTMS系统的主要用户基础上,将整个WLTMS系统划分为两个主要的子系统。主要开发平台为Visual Basic6.0与Dreamweaver8.0,数据库平台采用Microsoft SQLS erver2000。给出了系统部分应用界面。     

浅议电力企业安全文化建设的重要性

文章从安全文化建设是电力企业安全生产的灵魂出发,分析了电力企业安全文化的内涵、培育方法;阐明了电力企业安全与效益的关系以及安全文化在电力生产中的重要性。     

A macroeconomic analysis of foreign assets and foreign liabilities

Although an increase in foreign assets and a decrease in foreign liabilities both increase a nation’s net foreign assets (NFA), they have alternative macroeconomic transmission mechanisms: while an increase in foreign assets is expansionary, the effect of a decrease in foreign liabilities is mixed due to the asymmetry between its income effect and wealth effect on aggregate demand. It is the relative strengths of the NFA’s wealth effect and income effect that determine the existence and natures of a saddle-point equilibrium in the NFA-real balance space as well as its comparative statics. The cointegration analysis suggests that in the 1990s, foreign liabilities bear more weight than foreign assets in the US NFA movement whereas the opposite holds for the case of Japan; therefore, correcting NFA imbalances calls for accelerated money growth and fiscal expenditure pruning in the U.S. but for the opposite policy responses in Japan.