IN THE PERPETUALLY RESOURCE-STARVED environment of public health, where each disease or risk factor has to fight for a scrap of the federal budget, it is easy to forget how fast progress can be made when appropriate policy attention and resources are marshaled to solve a problem. The natural response of public health professionals to the starvation diet is to maintain low expectations. But thos...

One of the main global economic concerns before the financial crisis was the presence of large “global imbalances,” which refer to the massive and persistent current account deficits experienced by the United States and financed by the periphery . This concern was intellectually grounded on the devastating crises often experienced by emerging market economies that run chronic current account de...

Contentious events often come in waves, but they are seldom homogeneous. A series of contentious events over the past two years were the result of the global financial crisis that began in the United States in 2008 and ultimately diffused around the world. But it was in Greece and the European Union that the crisis hit hardest. There, conventional protest, violence, and political contention com...

Economists seeking explanations for the global financial crisis of 1997–99 are reaching consensus that a major factor was weak financial institutions, which resulted in part from inadequate government regulations. At the same time many developing countries are struggling with an overregulated financial system—one that stifles innovation and the flow of credit to new entrepreneurs and that can s...

Recent strong growth of China’s exports has elevated the country to a rising global economic power and caused geo-political concern to policy-makers in the country and its trading partners world-wide. What are the determinants of this growth, how has it affected major economies in ASEAN (World Bank, 2009) in particular, and what kind of evidence-based responses are required and appropriate? The...

Are current economic models well equipped to provide useful policy prescriptions? Many economists would have certainly answered, “yes” before the recent Global Recession. This economic crisis has not only demonstrated the importance of banking and financial markets for the dynamics of real economies. It has also revealed the inadequacy of the dominant theoretical framework. Standard models have...

BACKGROUND Health in Greece deteriorated after the recent financial crisis, but whether this decline was caused by the recent financial crisis has not been established. This article uses a quasi-experimental approach to examine the impact of the recent financial crisis on health in Greece. METHODS Data came from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions survey for the year...

Although the expansion of antiretroviral therapy (ART) in Africa has been celebrated for its success in providing treatment to more than four million people, there remain core challenges to expanding therapy to those in immediate need of care and those who will require it in the future [1]. The successes have depended substantially on funding from the international community, notably the Global...