Until 2012, most of China’s population lived in rural areas with markedly different patterns of household energy consumption from those in Chinese cities. The studies so far done on residential energy use in rural Chinese households have been limited to questionnaire surveys and panel data analyses. Hardly any studies on energy demand in rural areas have considered both the climatic and economi...

The household sector consumes a large amount of goods and services and is therefore a major source of global carbon emissions. This study aims to analyze per person household carbon emission (HCEs) patterns of urban and rural China over the period from 1995 to 2011. Annual macroeconomic data for the study were obtained from authentic Chinese government sources. Direct HCE estimates for each fos...

BACKGROUND Cross-country comparisons of unofficial payments in the health sector are sparse. In 2002 we conducted a social audit of the health sector of the three Baltic States. METHODS Some 10,320 household interviews from a stratified, last-stage-random, sample of 30 clusters per country, together with institutional reviews, produced preliminary results. Separate focus groups of service use...

In this paper we examine the patterning, by small areas, of four health related behaviours (smoking, alcohol consumption, diet, and exercise) in the West of Scotland, after controlling for a range of individual/household characteristics, using multilevel models. Smoking and drinking were measured both as binary and as continuous variables, and diet and exercise were each measured in two ways: '...

This article examines the influence of income distribution in the determination of effective demand in the US. A simple model is developed to simulate the effects of changing income inequality on the aggregate propensity to consume. The simulation results illustrate that income inequality has a substantial negative impact on consumption when household spending is assumed to be income-constraine...

A recent Newsweek article entitled “Why We’re Married to the Market” observed: “Seldom, if ever, has Main Street been so enthralled with Wall Street. We have become a nation of stock junkies—splurging on mutual funds, scouring market tables, and studying personal-finance columns” (Samuelson 1998). Journalists, policymakers, and observers from all walks of life have been taking note of the incre...

China has exploded onto the world economy over the past few decades and is undergoing rapid transformation toward relatively more services. The health sector is an important part of this transition. This article provides a historical account of the development of health care in China since 1949. It also focuses on health insurance and macroeconomic structural adjustment to less saving and more ...

Background Reducing energy consumption is the best sustainable long-term answer to the challenges associated with increasing demand for energy, fluctuating oil prices, uncertain energy supplies, and fears of global warming (European commission 2008; Wenig et al. 2015). Since the household sector represents around 30 % of the final global energy consumption (International Energy Agency 2014), cu...

The worldwide turndown in coffee revenue to the majority of resource poor primary producers has become a serious threat to sustainable development. There is however inadequate knowledge with respect to mechanisms used by resource poor coffee farmers to stave off situations of economic hardship. Using cross-sectional household survey data from southwest Ethiopia, the present study investigates w...