BACKGROUND Long term illness has far reaching impacts on individuals, and also places a large burden upon government. This paper quantifies the indirect economic impacts of illness related early retirement on individuals and government in Australia in 2009. METHODS The output data from a microsimulation model, Health&WealthMOD, was analysed. Health&WealthMOD is representative of the 45 to 64 ...

OBJECTIVE China's ongoing new health reform aims to reduce individual out-of-pocket (OOP) payments for healthcare services. The aim of this article is to analyse the impact of this reform and to draw policy implications. METHODS Data are retrieved from the relevant government publications. Polynomial regression models are used to predict future health expenditures. An extensive sensitivity an...

The impact of pollution and abatement policy within a stochastic endogenous growth model is analyzed. Environmental care is provided by the government and financed through income taxation and government bonds. Due to environmental preferences and partial perception of the individual’s impact on pollution, government debt influences equilibrium growth. Hence, there is an additional growth effect...

In Mark Greenberg's view, a national child care strategy should pursue four goals. Every parent who needs child care to get or keep work should be able to afford care without having to leave children in unhealthy or dangerous environments; all families should be able to place their children in settings that foster education and healthy development; parental choice should be respected; and a set...

Broadly speaking, there are three accounts of well-being: mental state accounts, objective list accounts and desire fulfilment accounts (Parfit, 1984) The latter two perspectives have arguably had a much greater influence on academic debate, particularly in economics, and certainly on public policy (Diener and Seligman, 2004). For example, governments routinely target poverty, unemployment, lit...

Typical developing countries are chara cterized by the problem of ‘over-government’. Economic growth is hampered by excessive government interventions. The state tends to interfere in almost all activities and endeavours to regulate them minutely. The government sector which is often very large, employs a high proportion of the population outside agriculture. The administration tends to be more...

The official poverty rate for American children rose during the 1970s and 1980s and fell during the 1990s, but it was still significantly higher in 1999 than in 1969. Since the poverty line is supposed to represent a fixed standard of living, these change in child poverty imply that low-income children’s standard of living was lower in 1999 than in 1969. We test this hypothesis using data on ho...

Many transition and developing economies have reduced direct public involvement in the production and trade of seed and other agricultural inputs. This trend creates opportunities for farmers to realize improved access to inputs, including technology from international private research. Unfortunately, input regulations often derail these opportunities by blocking private entry and the introduct...

The 1940s were a decade of sharp contraction in wage inequality, particularly at the top of the distribution. We study this narrowing using a new dataset on the compensation of top executives. Relative to average earnings, median executive pay declined 0.34 log points from 1940 to 1949. We find that government regulation—including explicit salary restrictions and taxation—had, at best, a modest...

The health and social care workforce is now the largest segment of the Australian workforce with over 1.4million workers. In a personnel-intensive industry such as health,workforce is themost important single issue to address as we look to the future of our health system. Driven as it is by the increasing demand of chronic disease, ageing and a population that has a voracious appetite for healt...