Assessing whether or not an underclass exists, how it came to be, and what policies are likely to affect it all turn on how the term "underclass" is defined. The underclass has been variously defined by any or all of four characteristics: chronic poverty; nonnormative behavior with respect to income generation and family formation; spatial concentration of such poverty and/or behavior; and inte...

• ensuring that government health policies improve the position of disadvantaged people; • assessing the differential impact of health policies across the whole population; • identifying potential impacts of health policies on specific groups within a population. Despite there being no agreement on the significance of this process—and the process still needs to be evaluated— HIA is being extens...

The Harrod-Domar growth model is extended in a way that introduces the possibility of persistent excess capacity as a potential source of slow growth. This extended model has five growth rates, which must be equal for there to be a full-employment, full-capacity dynamic equilibrium, instead of the three growth rates in the standard Harrod-Domar model. These growth rates will be called the justi...

The Group of Eight (G8) countries occupy a dominant position in the international economic and political order. Given what is known about influences on the social determinants of health in an interconnected world, the G8 are a logical starting point for any enquiry into the relations between foreign policy and health. We first make five arguments for adopting an explicitly normative, equity-ori...

Written by a group of political science researchers, this commentary focuses on the contributions of political science to public health and proposes research avenues to increase those contributions. Despite progress, the links between researchers from these two fields develop only slowly. Divergences between the approach of political science to public policy and the expectations that public hea...

Value claims about ecological populations, communities, and systems appear everywhere in literature put out by leading environmental advisory institutions. This essay clarifies the content of such normatively significant value claims in two main steps. In it, I first outline the conception of ecological entities, functionality, and properties, I argue is operative in the background of modern ec...

INTRODUCTION The aim of the paper is to examine the role of income inequality and redistribution for income-related health inequalities in Europe. This paper contributes in two ways to the literature on macro determinants of socio-economic inequalities in health. First, it widens the distinctive focus of the research field on welfare state regimes to quantifiable measures such as social policy ...

Objective. Although such measures received media attention as indicative of a nationwide rebellion against sprawl, determinants of the appearance and success of 1998 and 1999 open-space preservation ballot measures have not been investigated. We suspect that, contrary to assumptions, these are not triggered by sprawled development and represent a response limited to small, wealthy communities. ...

Intertemporal budget policies are assessed in an endogenous growth model with nominal assets. The paper provides relative rankings of policies and policy instruments in terms of the tax liabilities of the private sector necessary to guarantee intertemporal government budget solvency and in terms of the welfare of the representative agent. The role of nominal assets is shown to be of relative im...

This article is part of a series written for people responsible for making decisions about health policies and programmes and for those who support these decision makers. In this article we address considerations of equity. Inequities can be defined as "differences in health which are not only unnecessary and avoidable but, in addition, are considered unfair and unjust". These have been well do...