Child height is an important indicator of human capital and human development, in large part because early life health and net nutrition shape both child height and adult economic productivity and health. Between 2005 and 2010, the average height of children under 5 in Cambodia significantly increased. What contributed to this improvement? Recent evidence suggests that exposure to poor sanitati...

BACKGROUND Infant mortality rate is a useful indicator of health conditions in the society, the racial and socioeconomic inequality of which is from the most important measures of social inequality. OBJECTIVES The aim of this study was to determine the socioeconomic inequality and its determinants regarding infant mortality in an Iranian population. PATIENTS AND METHODS This cross-sectional...

Declining union density in many industrialized countries raises the interest in alternative ways of labor relations and worker representation. Provided that workplace representation has desirable social consequences; for a policy maker its effect on firm productivity is crucial for evaluating its usefulness. German works councils are the most powerful form of institutionalized work place repres...

BACKGROUND Women and men share similar health challenges yet women report poorer health. The study investigates the social determinants of self-reported health in women and men, and male-female differences in health. METHODS Data on 103154 men and 125728 women were analysed from 57 countries in the World Health Survey 2002-2004. Item Response Theory was used to construct a composite measure o...

BACKGROUND Obesity prevalence varies between geographic regions in Canada. The reasons for this variation are unclear but most likely implicate both individual-level and population-level factors. The objective of this study was to examine whether equalising correlates of body mass index (BMI) across these geographic regions could be reasonably expected to reduce differences in BMI distributions...

OBJECTIVES While gender differences in physical activity (PA) have been reported, their origin is not well understood. The present study aimed to identify factors contributing to this disparity. METHODS This was a population-based cross-sectional study based on the 2011 surveillance of risk factors of non-communicable diseases that was conducted among Iranian adults. Multi-staged sampling was...

Article history: Received 7 February 2014 Received in revised form 27 July 2014 Accepted 28 July 2014 Available online 5 August 2014 This paper discusses the issue of informal employment and its effect on the income distribution in China using datasets from the China Urban Labour Surveys of 2005 and 2010. Based on a new definition of informal employment, we estimated the proportion of informal ...

We examine the influence of socio-environmental (and birth cohort specific) effects on both adult height and gender dimorphism (height gap). Our data set is from contemporary Spain, a country governed by an authoritarian regime for about 40 years. Both OLS and quantile regression approaches are used to examine these patterns. Furthermore, we then draw upon a Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition approac...

BACKGROUND In Australia a persistent and sizable gender wage gap exists. In recent years this gap has been steadily widening. The negative impact of gender wage differentials is the disincentive to work more hours. This implies a substantial cost on the Australian health sector. This study aimed to identify the magnitude of gender wage differentials within the health sector. The investigation a...