Background Post-communist health care reforms and the break-up of Czechoslovakia have been studied from various perspectives, but little research has addressed the impact on health system performance. This paper investigates the quality and performance of the Slovak and Czech health systems before and after 1989, including the year of separation in 1993, using the concept of ‘avoidable’ mortality.

The objectives of this study were to provide estimates of indoor tanning device use among US high school students and provide baseline data before implementation of a 10% excise tax on indoor tanning device use mandated by recent federal health care reform legislation. We examined the frequency of indoor tanning device use by using data from the 2009 national Youth Risk Behavior Survey. Overall...

In an era of economic crisis in Greece and with many uninsured citizens, the Troika (lenders of Greece) suggests reforms and promotes the internal market, resulting in a public-private system becoming more privatized. This article contradicts these proposals and attempts to suggest the necessary reforms to achieve equity of access for all and to promote efficiency, taking into account the exist...

background & purpose: promotion of postgraduate medical education (pgme) is constantly one of the main concerns’ for medical education policy makers because of the key role of residents and graduated specialists/subspecialists in health care system. this study aimed to determine challenges, and potential solutions for promoting the pgme in iran by exploring the expert’s implicit knowledge.  met...

To prevent further increases in energy consumption, the government of Iran commenced energy subsidy reform in 2010. This paper investigates the fuel conservation effects of the reform in Iran using a homothetic translog cost function that provides estimates of the own- and cross-price elasticities of fuel demands. The percentage reduction in fuel demands is estimated using the likely effect of ...

Regular physical activity (PA) is an underlying factor since childhood and adolescence for having a healthy and active future for life. The aim of this stud y was to review the evidence on increasing the youth PA to develop the national program at country level. At first, the databases were searched using the sensitive keywords, and systematic reviews of the relevant databases were extracted. T...

1 The last clause is important. If we have little confidence in our model of the economy, or political economy, the value of an extension of any normative statement relative to that economy to a concrete existing economy is considerably devalued. 2 This framing of the issues directly contradicts the claims made for the new research on the political economy of policy reform in Rodrik (1993). I h...

The South African land reform programme has been widely criticised for its slow pace as well as its apparent lack of contribution to poverty reduction. However, there is little systematic evidence of the impact of land transfers on their beneficiaries due to data scarcity. This paper combines econometric evidence based on official household surveys with qualitative data collected specifically t...

In Japan, there are two different systems of death investigation: criminal inspection and judicial autopsy from a criminal justice standpoint and, from a public health standpoint, administrative inspection and either administrative or consent autopsy. As a result, it is sometimes unclear which system is responsible for investigating a death. In this study, the Japanese death inquiry system is c...