Traditionally, fluctuations in firms’ stocks have played a key role in shaping the business cycle in industrialised economies. While changes in stocks – that is, inventory investment – account for only a very small part of the level of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) they play an important part in explaining changes in the level of GDP. In Australia, over the past thirty years, quarterly changes i...

The aim of this study is to analyze the causality relationship among a set of macroeconomic variables, represented by the exchange rate, interest rate, inflation (CPI), industrial production index as a proxy for gross domestic product in relation to the index of the São Paulo Stock Exchange (Bovespa). The period of analysis corresponded to the months from January 1995 to December 2010, making a...

BACKGROUND Multimorbidity defined as the "the coexistence of two or more chronic diseases" in one individual, is increasing in prevalence globally. The aim of this study is to compare the prevalence of multimorbidity across low and middle-income countries (LMICs), and to investigate patterns by age and education, as a proxy for socio-economic status (SES). METHODS Chronic disease data from 28...

Scattered works by political scientists since the 1970s have reported that Democratic presidents have compiled stronger economic records than their Republican counterparts: economic growth has been higher, unemployment lower, and inequality has fallen during Democratic administrations while the opposite outcomes have occurred under Republican presidents. Recently, however, Campbell has vigorous...

The per capita ecological footprint (EF) is one of the most widely recognized measures of environmental sustainability. It aims to quantify the Earth's biological resources required to support human activity. In this paper, we summarize relevant previous literature, and present five factors that influence per capita EF. These factors are: National gross domestic product (GDP), urbanization (ind...

Back in the early 1970s, Partha Dasgupta realized that the economic models of the time were neglecting an entire class of capital assets: natural resources. Over the course of his career, Dasgupta, an economist at the University of Cambridge and a foreign associate of the National Academy of Sciences, has worked to put “natural capital” on an equal footing with other capital assets, exploring h...

In 2012, the Chatham House established a Working Group on Health Financing, of which I was a member, to deliberate on a global framework for health financing (Røttingen et al., 2014) (reference to paper by McIntyre et al., 2017). Intensive discussions and exhaustive studies brought out 20 recommendations. Of them three were important points emphasizing the need for countries to (i) ensure a min...

We employ the Bayesian framework to define a cointegration measure aimed to represent long term relationships between time series. For visualization of these relationships we introduce a dissimilarity matrix and a map based on the Sorting Points Into Neighborhoods (SPIN) technique, which has been previously used to analyze large data sets from DNA arrays. We exemplify the technique in three dat...

In an era of increasingly complex medical care and escalating costs, healthcare decision-makers often rely on a broad range of indicators to gauge the health of a population, the quality of hospital care and the performance of healthcare systems. Reports that rank the health of Canadians and Canada's healthcare systems according to these indicators are widely cited in the media. These reports a...

Health care expenditures are projected to reach nearly 20% of the U.S. gross domestic product by 2020. Up to $765 billion of this spending has been identified as potentially avoidable; many of the avoidable costs have been attributed to unnecessary services. Postgraduate trainees have historically received little specific training in the stewardship of health care resources and minimal feedback...