Western governmental responses to the various political crises which erupted in the Balkans after 1989 have been remarkably uniform. There is a widespread feeling among govemmentalleaders and their policy advisers that western Europe ought to insulate itself from the various inter-state and internal conflicts which have periodically flared up in the region. No core western interests appear to b...

The recent growth in trade between the People's Republic of China and the Western nations has focused attention on the need to better understand China's social system in order to avoid some of the problems caused when trade occurs between radically different cultures. One potential problem area for Sino-Western traders is the paucity of protection China affords inventions, trademarks, and liter...

Obesity and associated health risks disproportionately affect Aboriginal (First Nations) children in Canada. The purpose of this research study was to elicit First Nations children's perceptions of food, activity, and health to inform a community-based obesity prevention strategy. Fifteen 4th- and 5th-Grade students participated in one of three focus group interviews that utilized drawing and p...

In her article "Aboriginal Australian and Canadian First Nations Children's Literature" Angeline O'Neill discusses Canadian First Nations and Australian Aboriginal children's picture books and their appeal to a dual readership. Inuit traditional storyteller and writer Michael Kusugak, Nyoongar traditional storyteller and writer Lorna Little, and Wunambal elder Daisy Utemorrah are cases in point...

CAPLAN: I know of no evidence that the citizens of nations with universal coverage “overutilize” health care services. Some of these systems tightly regulate access to specialty care by requiring referrals from primary care physicians, so they use gate-keeping to discourage overuse. Others strictly control expenditures on high technology and on expensive drugs; you can’t overutilize resources t...

The modern concept of globalization in health care and clinical research often carries a positive message for the "Global South" nations of Africa, South America and Southeast Asia. However, bioethical abuse of participants in clinical trials still exists in the Global South. Unethical studies directed by the "Global North", formed by the medically advanced nations in North America, Western Eur...

Previous studies find large cross-national differences in inequality amongst rich Western nations, due in large part to differences in the generosity of welfare state transfers. The United States is the least generous nation and the one having the most after-tax and transfer inequality. But these analyses are limited to the effects of cash and near-cash transfers and direct taxes on incomes, wh...

There is a well-established tendency for people to see themselves as better than average (self-enhancement), although the universality of this phenomenon is contested. Much less well-known is the tendency for people to see themselves as more human than average (self-humanizing). We examined these biases in six diverse nations: Australia, Germany, Israel, Japan, Singapore, and the USA. Both bias...

The opinions in the paper are ours alone and do not represent the views of the International Labour Organization (who originally commissioned the study) or other bodies. For helpful comments, we thank Summary The paper studies the labour markets of Eastern Europe. It uses new data on 60,000 randomly sampled workers in the transition economies. To allow a comparison, the paper analyses Western d...

BACKGROUND Scotland has been dubbed 'the sick man of Europe' on account of its higher mortality rates compared with other western European countries. It is not clear the length of time for which Scotland has had higher mortality rates. The root causes of the higher mortality in Scotland remain elusive. METHODS Life expectancy data from the Human Mortality Database were tabulated and graphed f...