BACKGROUND Just as developing states are blessed with natural resources capable of transforming their economies into a positive direction, the imposed World Trade Organisation's (WTO) mores continue to relegate them to the status of underdevelopment. The consequences of this on investment, trade and finance in Third World States (TWSs), especially Africa, are disarticulation of the economy, exp...

BACKGROUND Within affluent populations, there are marked socioeconomic gradients in health behavior, with people of lower socioeconomic position smoking more, exercising less, having poorer diets, complying less well with therapy, using medical services less, ignoring health and safety advice more, and being less health-conscious overall, than their more affluent peers. Whilst the proximate mec...

OBJECTIVE This article examines the role of National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) technology appraisal in detail, focussing on the process itself and the methods used to establish cost-effective practices for the National Health Service (NHS). AREAS OF AGREEMENT Approaches to identifying both effective and cost-effective practices have become central to rationing decisio...

BACKGROUND Health systems face rising patient expectations and economic pressures; decision makers seek to enhance efficiency to improve access to appropriate care. There is international interest in the role of HTA to support decisions to optimize use of established technologies, particularly in "disinvesting" from low-benefit uses. METHODS This study summarizes main points from an HTAi Poli...

Inclusive Living is a concept and practical intervention developed from systematic literature review co-produced by the Scottish housing sector. The approach aims to implement inclusive change in areas of development, repair, maintenance service delivery facilitating longer term planning within organisations create homes that are accessible allow for ageing-in-place. This synthesis paper critic...

Natural resource users face a trade-off between present and future consumption. Using harmful methods or extracting unsustainably, lowers future consumption. Therefore, it is reasonable to posit that people with higher time preferences extract more as compared to people with lower time preferences. The present study combines experimental methods and questionnaire data in order to understand the...

Facing a projected $1.4M deficit on a $35M operating budget for fiscal year 2011/2012, members of the Dalhousie University Faculty of Medicine developed and implemented an explicit, transparent, criteria-based priority setting process for resource reallocation. A task group that included representatives from across the Faculty of Medicine used a program budgeting and marginal analysis (PBMA) fr...

This article contributes to a growing literature on working-class suburbanization by arguing that both the residualization and privatization of council housing need to be properly historicized. This case study of housing policy in the borough of Brighton demonstrates that council house sales between the 1950s and 1970s were important in the residualization of inter-war estates well before the '...

Accidental drug overdose is a substantial cause of mortality for drug users. Neighborhood-level factors, such as income distribution, may be important determinants of overdose death independent of individual-level factors. We used data from the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner to identify all cases of accidental deaths in New York City (NYC) in 1996 and individual-level covariates. We used ...

Reurbanisation and the pursuit of more compact settlement structures are only just starting to become mainstream vocabulary in the USA and Australia, and have probably been driven by market mechanisms rather than a rigorously promoted planning paradigm. In Europe, the situation is starkly different. Similar to their New World counterparts, many European cities experienced rapid suburban expansi...