BACKGROUND The paper describes the origins of the Value of Children (VOC) approach to the cross-cultural research on fertility behavior around the Pacific Rim, and critically discusses its shortcomings at this stage. OBJECTIVE The paper then demonstrates how the approach derives its theoretical coherence from the theory of social production functions, making reference to empirical evidence. RES...

Introduction: Economic development and public welfare are some of macroeconomic goals for any country. Health economy is one of the parameters as criterion for action in evaluation of this important subject. The present study has been intended to investigate into the relationship among factors of health economy including total health expenditures (some percent of Gross Domestic Product GDP), li...

All rights reserved. Short sections of text, not to exceed two paragraphs, may be quoted without explicit permission provided that full credit, including O notice, is given to the source. There are two principal theories of why countries trade: comparative advantage and increasing returns to scale. Yet there is no empirical work that assesses the relative importance of these two theories in acc...

Traditional economic theories stress the relevance of political, institutional, geographic, and historical factors for economic growth. In contrast, human-capital theories suggest that peoples' competences, mediated by technological progress, are the deciding factor in a nation's wealth. Using three large-scale assessments, we calculated cognitive-competence sums for the mean and for upper- and...