Many studies have examined trends toward increasing consolidation of physician practices and hospitals in the US health care system and the negative effects of decreased competition on the quality of patient care and health care costs.1 Since 2010, there have been 561 hospital mergers,2 and nearly half of hospital markets are highly concentrated.3 Independent physician practice has declined; 33...

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in currency :union:s internationally. The formation of currency :union: in Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) has drawn much attention of Islamic countries. This paper aims to investigate the effect of currency :union: formation for trade among 49 Islamic countries over the period 1990-2012 by OCA and Augmented Gravity Model (AGM). T...

As a result of recent developments, global economic centre of gravity has slide to Asia-Pacific region. It is predicted that Asia-Pacific countries will take place at the first row in global trade and nearly a half of the total trade will intensify in this region at the year 2030. On the other hand, the region covers countries from different levels of development. These features of the region p...

many studies indicate that trade costs are large and significant. the question is whether trade costs could explain the size of the trade and shed light on the mystery of missing trade. in this framework, this paper studies 73 developing countries in the period 2005-2011. the results of our panel data analysis signify that “the pecuniary costs of trade” and “the number of necessary documents” a...

We present a theory of why some countries negotiate trade agreements during economic downturns. We argue that political leaders can gain from such agreements because of the signals they send to their publics. Publics are less likely to blame leaders for bad economic conditions when they have implemented sound economic policies, such as signing and implementing agreements designed to liberalize ...

he main purpose of this research is to answer the question that "How neighborhood of Iran's trading partners will have an effect on Iran intra-industry trade? For this purpose, the impact of spatial neighborhood effects of 23 major trade partners on Iran’s intra-industry trade for the period of 1995-2014, has been investigated through Spatial Panel Econometric and Maximum Likelihood Estimator (...

Policy incoherence at the interface between trade policy and health can take many forms, such as international trade commitments that strengthen protection of pharmaceutical patents, or promotion of health tourism that exacerbates the shortage of physicians in rural areas. Focusing on the national policy-making process, we make recommendations regarding five conditions that are necessary, but n...