This part of the report presents the results of an analysis of the responsiveness of home consumption of a variety of foods to variations in incomes and prices over the period 1988 to 2000. It provides information on the way in which food expenditures and quantities vary with income across households and through time; as well as on the way in which they vary through time with prices, controllin...

The prospects for achieving price stability and full employment sooner with wage and price controls than with traditional monetary and fiscal actions alone depend on the ability of the wage and price controls to dampen expectations of inflation. Until expectations of inflation are substantially reduced, inflationary pressures \vill remain strong evcn though measured prices are constrained by go...

The OASI eligibility provisions include a retirement test (or earnings test), and in 1979 aged beneficiaries who are under age 72 give up $1 in current benefits for each $2 of annual earnings above $4,500. If the retirement test were eliminated, total OASI payouts would increase because aged workers would no longer forfeit benefits. Aged workers also might increase earnings or delay retirement ...

If Medicare eligibility were delayed to age sixty-seven, as proposed periodically by policymakers, most sixty-five- and sixty-six-year-olds (the "young elderly") would find alternative sources of coverage. However, the loss of Medicare eligibility would leave about 9 percent of this age group uninsured, while another 11 percent would be underinsured because they could only afford limited nongro...

This paper studies the extent to which qualitative features of Walrasian equilibria are refutable given a nite data set. In particular, we consider the hypothesis that the observed data are Walrasian equilibria in which each price vector is locally stable under tâtonnement. Our main result shows that a nite set of observations of prices, individual incomes and aggregate consumption vectors is r...

For much of the postwar period, the Australian welfare state has been misunderstood by overseas social policy commentators. The lack of generosity of welfare payments has been substantially compensated for by a system of wage regulation that has prevented waged poverty and delivered a reduced disparity of incomes. The strong emphasis on means-testing of benefits has not had the stigmatizing eff...

OBJECTIVE To determine public attitudes towards emergency research, exception from informed consent (EFIC) and a specific proposed clinical trial using EFIC. METHODS As part of a planned community consultation activity, a survey was conducted at a popular public venue. Participants answered demographic questions and then were asked their opinions on specifically described consent circumstance...

— Convergence of national GDP/capita numbers is a common, but narrow, measure of global success or failure in development. This paper takes a broader range of quality of life variables covering health, education, rights and infrastructure and examines if they are converging across countries. It finds that these measures are converging as a rule and (where we have data) that they have been conve...

Focus must be shifted from income inequality to economic inequality because of the presence of causal influences on individual well-being and freedom that are economic in nature but cannot be expounded by simple statistics of incomes and commodity holdings. Attention must be given to heterogeneous magnitudes. Moreover, there is a need for the derivation of partial orderings based on explicit or...

This paper reports the results of a comparative survey in five nations: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The survey finds a high level of citizen dissatisfaction with the health care systems in all five countries. Citizens with incomes below the national median were more likely than were those with higher incomes to be dissatisfied. In contrast, relativ...