OBJECTIVE To examine the role of tobacco use in creating financial hardship for New Zealand (NZ) low income households with children. DATA The 1996 NZ census (smoking prevalence by household types), Statistics NZ (household spending surveys 1988-98), and NZ Customs (tobacco released from bond 1988-98). MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Proportion of children in households with smokers and < or = 15,000...

This study sought to explore the sex and cultural differences in satisfaction with life between undergraduate men and women recruited from four Arab countries, i.e., Egypt, Kuwait, Lebanon, and Qatar (N = 1,322); ages ranged from 18 to 27 years. The participants responded to the Arabic version of the Satisfaction with Life Scale. Egyptian and Lebanese women obtained significantly higher mean sc...

The conventional neoclassical economic wisdom argues that the opportunity costs of environmental regulations are high, with negative implications for costs and profits and, by implication, for growth and per capita gross domestic product (GDP). The minority view that environmental controls induce cost offsets that minimise such opportunity costs is marginalised by the conventional wisdom, which...

We introduce a general framework for kinetic BGK models. We assume to be given a system of hyperbolic conservation laws with a family of Lax entropies, and we characterize the BGK models that lead to this system in the hydrodynamic limit, and that are compatible with the whole family of entropies. This is obtained by a new characterization of maxwellians as entropy minimizers, that can take int...

Article history: Received 13 August 2014 Received in revised form 6 December 2014 Accepted 17 December 2014 Available online 7 January 2015

Much has been written about the measurement of socio-economic position (SEP) in high-income countries (HIC). Less has been written for an epidemiology, health systems and public health audience about the measurement of SEP in low- and middle-income countries (LMIC). The social stratification processes in many LMIC-and therefore the appropriate measurement tools-differ considerably from those in...

Introduction Low-quality education is an endemic problem in most developing countries. International tests of student achievement consistently show that developing countries score at the bottom of the performance scale. In many countries, raising education quality has replaced expanding coverage as the principal challenge facing education ministries. In fact, a recent study by Hanushek titled “...