Back in the early 1970s, Partha Dasgupta realized that the economic models of the time were neglecting an entire class of capital assets: natural resources. Over the course of his career, Dasgupta, an economist at the University of Cambridge and a foreign associate of the National Academy of Sciences, has worked to put “natural capital” on an equal footing with other capital assets, exploring h...

In 2012, the Chatham House established a Working Group on Health Financing, of which I was a member, to deliberate on a global framework for health financing (Røttingen et al., 2014) (reference to paper by McIntyre et al., 2017). Intensive discussions and exhaustive studies brought out 20 recommendations. Of them three were important points emphasizing the need for countries to (i) ensure a min...

We employ the Bayesian framework to define a cointegration measure aimed to represent long term relationships between time series. For visualization of these relationships we introduce a dissimilarity matrix and a map based on the Sorting Points Into Neighborhoods (SPIN) technique, which has been previously used to analyze large data sets from DNA arrays. We exemplify the technique in three dat...

In an era of increasingly complex medical care and escalating costs, healthcare decision-makers often rely on a broad range of indicators to gauge the health of a population, the quality of hospital care and the performance of healthcare systems. Reports that rank the health of Canadians and Canada's healthcare systems according to these indicators are widely cited in the media. These reports a...

Health care expenditures are projected to reach nearly 20% of the U.S. gross domestic product by 2020. Up to $765 billion of this spending has been identified as potentially avoidable; many of the avoidable costs have been attributed to unnecessary services. Postgraduate trainees have historically received little specific training in the stewardship of health care resources and minimal feedback...

BACKGROUND Zhongshan City of Guangdong Province (China) is a key provincial and national level area for dengue fever prevention and control. The aim of this study is to analyze how the direct hospitalization costs and the length of stay of dengue hospitalization cases vary according to associated factors such as the demographics, virus types and hospital accreditation. METHOD This study is ba...

In Western societies, the impact of air pollution on residents' health is higher in less wealthy communities. However, it is not clear whether such an interaction effect applies to developing countries. The authors examine how the level of community development modifies the impact of air pollution on health outcomes of the Chinese elderly using data from the third wave of the Chinese Longitudin...

BACKGROUND Little has been reported on costs of cancer registration, and standard indicators have not yet been identified. This study investigated costs and outcomes of a sample of 18 European registries covering a population of 58.8 million inhabitants. METHODS Through a questionnaire, we asked registries for real cost data including personnel, information technology (IT), and infrastructure...

Introduction Innovations in medical care have led to improvements in quality and quantity of life. Researchers estimated that improvements in medical care contributed to the life expectancy for newborns increasing by almost seven years from 1960 to 2000. However, U.S. health spending reached an estimated 2.7 trillion dollars in 2010 and the health share of the gross domestic product is projecte...

Gauging economic conditions in real time is challenging, in part because economic data are difficult to measure and subject to subsequent revision as more information becomes available. This article investigates the pattern and size of revisions to real gross domestic product (GDP) over the past decade or so. Revisions to early estimates of GDP can be large and, over the past 15 years, have ten...