www.phil.frb.org Business Review Q1 2004 23 www.phil.frb.org ver the past 20 years, the U.S. economy has had fewer and shorter recessions. In addition, over time, swings in the growth of many macroeconomic variables, such as gross domestic product, have become smaller. Why this decline in economic volatility? In this article, Keith Sill highlights some of the facts about the increased stability...

Since its release in early December 2006, the Iraq Study Group’s (ISG) military, political and diplomatic recommendations have generated wide-spread discussions. Unfortunately, the country’s economic recovery has received considerably less attention. Yet the country’s economic situation is quite dire. The ISG correctly notes that: (a) instead of meeting a target of 10 percent growth for 2006 on...

The integration of central and Eastern Europe into both the European and the world economy was in the last decade associated with a relatively high growth of gross domestic product and with a gradual increase in the economic level. The processes of convergence at the national level, however, were accompanied by an unbalanced spatial development. The paper analyzes, on the basis of the empirical...

The structural sustainability of the Brazilian health system refers to the country's pattern of development according to how this pattern is expressed and reproduced in the Brazilian population. This derives not only from its social dimension, but also from the economic one, as it accounts for a significant part of the gross domestic product and of job creation, and produces a great impact on t...

Deltas are highly sensitive to increasing risks arising from local human activities, land subsidence, regional water management, global sea-level rise, and climate extremes. We quantified changing flood risk due to extreme events using an integrated set of global environmental, geophysical, and social indicators. Although risks are distributed across all levels of economic development, wealthy ...

BACKGROUND In the decade after 1983, the annual growth rate of drug expenditure was about four times as high as that of per capita gross domestic product (GDP) in Shanghai. In 1993 and 1994, a drug list policy and hospital revenue capping policy were introduced in Shanghai to contain drug expenditure. We studied the impact of these two policies, as a model for similar policies in other parts of...

The indexes of multifactor productivity for two-digit manufacturing sectors prepared by the Bureau of Labor Statistics for sectors in manufacturing have been revised and extended to cover the 1949–92 period. These indexes, also called the “KLEMS” multifactor measures, compare changes in output to changes in a composite of all the inputs used in production—capital, labor, energy inputs, nonenerg...

We study the gross domestic product (GDP) per capita together with the market capitalization (MCAP) per capita as two indicators of the effect of globalization. We find that g, the GDP per capita, as a function of m, the MCAP per capita, follows a power law with average exponent close to 1/3. In addition, the Zipf ranking approach confirms that the m for countries with initially lower values of...

Imagine a meeting convened to avert a global financial crisis where none of the finance ministers had access to reliable information on changes in the stock market, national gross domestic product or international trade flows. It is hardly conceivable. Yet the infinitely more existence-threatening planetary social and ecological crisis we refer to as 'global change' (comprising the linked issue...

Amid widespread reports of deforestation, some nations have nevertheless experienced transitions from deforestation to reforestation. In a causal relationship, the Forest Identity relates the carbon sequestered in forests to the changing variables of national or regional forest area, growing stock density per area, biomass per growing stock volume, and carbon concentration in the biomass. It qu...