BACKGROUND AND AIMS The botanic gardens of the world are now unmatched ex situ collections of plant biodiversity. They mirror two biogeographical patterns (positive diversity-area and diversity-age relationships) but differ from nature with a positive latitudinal gradient in their richness. Whether these relationships can be explained by socio-economic factors is unknown. METHODS Species and ...

The new UK focus on well-being: what will it mean for tackling social inequalities in health? It is difficult to imagine who would not be in favour of improving well-being. Yet a major problem with well-being is knowing what different commentators understand by the term. First introduced by the World Health Organization in 1948, 1 there is still little consensus over how well-being should be de...

Seventeen years have passed since the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro took place. When the leaders will meet next time at the Johannesburg Summit, they will confront a world situation markedly different in many ways. Globalization, characterized by the liberalization of trade and capital markets and the rapid development of information and communi...

We measured the business-cycle correlations of the real gross domestic product (GDP) growth rates of two cities to capture the degree of segmentation across China’s provincial and regional borders. This type of segmentation can be caused by local protectionism as well as other economic and geographic factors. After controlling the other factors, we zeroed in on the administrative border effect ...

The post-war Keynesian welfare state in Europe was sustainable as long as post-war European economies were growing and were relatively closed; however, over the years, as entitlements grew ever bigger and coverage became ever more universal, the proportion of GDP spent on public services rose considerably. With economies becoming more open, the stagnation which started in the second half of the...

OBJECTIVE Adverse living standards are associated with poorer child health and safety. This study investigates whether adverse housing and neighbourhood conditions contribute to explain country-level associations between a country's economic level and income inequality and child mortality, specifically injury mortality. DESIGN Ecological, cross-sectional study. SETTING/SUBJECTS Twenty-six E...

• These costs cannot be calculated precisely, but the following are cautious estimates: Public spending to deal with the fallout of child poverty is about £12 billion a year, about 60 per cent of which goes on personal social services, school education and police and criminal justice. The annual cost of below-average employment rates and earnings levels among adults who grew up in poverty is ab...

Ecuador is located between latitudes 2°N and 5°S and limits the Pacific Ocean on the west, Colombia on the north, and Peru on the south and east (Fig. 1). Its capital, Quito, stands at 2850 m (9350 ft.) above sea level. The country has four different geographic regions, the Coast (west of the Andes), the Sierra (Interandean highlands), the Amazon (east of the Andes), and the Insular region (Gal...

The United States has a much more unequal distribution of income than most developed nations. In fact, although it has one of the highest standards of living on average, as measured by its gross domestic product per capita, the more unequal income distribution translates into comparatively high rates of both relative poverty (50 percent of median disposable income) and absolute poverty (the off...

Logistics Industry is regarded as the artery and basal industry of country economic development. Its degree of the development is one of the symbols of modernization and comprehensive national strength, and is described as the accelerator on promoting economic development. By using economic analytical method, the article takes the gross domestic product (GDP) as the explained variable and the v...