Beyond Health Care: New Directions to a Healthier America

Outlines recommendations for governments, schools, healthcare providers, philanthropies, and others to collaborate on implementing feasible, evidence-based interventions that create healthier communities and address the needs of those most at risk

Survey of indoor air quality in residences of WIC participants in Lincoln, Nebraska

Since 1992, Women, Infants, and Children at the Lincoln Lancaster County Health Department has provided supplemental food benefits, nutrition information, breastfeeding support, immunization referrals, and dental services to support low-income families and their children. However, statewide, the retention rate has been dropping since 2009, and if this continues, it can result in adverse health outcomes. As part of the Service Learning activities, this study aims to evaluate current services on clients’ experiences and improve their satisfaction by conducting the WIC participant-centered services survey. This cost-effective intervention program has been working successfully, however it does not provide the information of environmental health. To understand WIC enrolled families’ home environment, as part of the Capstone Experience we conducted the indoor air quality survey to investigate existing indoor air contaminants and related health problems. This survey was a questionnaire designed to collect information of sources of air pollution in homes (cleaning practices, natural and forced ventilation, lead, mold, tobacco smoke, etc.) and resident’s respiratory symptoms. The data was collected by face-to-face interviews at the two WIC clinics, LLCHD and satellite office, from 50 individuals who have lived in their current residence more than six months. The results were used to identify present residential air contaminants that can cause respiratory symptoms. Health effects caused by indoor air pollution is preventable by good maintenance and housekeeping practices. The goal of the project is to increase the mother’s knowledge about indoor air quality in low-income communities and support them to reduce contaminants for better health outcomes. Ultimately, the information collected by surveys can be used to plan a support program that increases mother’s awareness of air pollutants and prevention

Is information and communication technology (ICT) the right strategy for growth in Mexico?

Although empirical evidence available suggests that information and communication technologies (ICT) have positively contributed to important sectors of the Mexican economy, it is still unknown to which extent ICT have truly contributed to productivity among these sectors. The increasing implementation and imports of ICT technologies, the growing demand for ICT-skilled human capital and training, the rising level of wages and the large demand and adoption of these technologies seem to indicate a positive correlation between ICT implementation and economic growth in Mexico. To answer whether ICT may be a key strategy for economic growth in the Mexican economy is the main purpose of this work. --Information technology,total factor productivity,growth,knowledge,human capital,technology diffusion

Welfare reform in the United States. A descriptive policy analysis

Poverty alleviation is an important objective of European countries and of the United States. If these ‘rich’ states offer elaborate systems of income maintenance, why is there still a considerable amount of poverty? And why are anti-poverty outcomes so different in the United States compared to European countries? This paper completes a trilogy of cross-country research papers on anti-poverty policy. Two former papers analyzed the effects of social transfers on both poverty levels and poverty alleviation through tax and social transfer systems. These papers marked the United States as an outlier: high poverty rates, low public social spending but high private social expenditures, a rather strong belief that people are poor because of laziness or lack of will, and remarkable differences across the Federal States caused by state discretion. Therefore, this paper analyzes U.S. welfare in more detail; we focus on part of the major welfare reform in 1996. The 1996 welfare reform emphasizes an American preference for work. Indeed, the welfare reform increased work, although the earnings of most individuals who left welfare were still below the poverty line, even many years after their exit. A drawback of this work-first approach is the termination of cash assistance after 5 years, especially for vulnerable groups with low skills. Recent economic recession can cause severe troubles; one could - for example – argue that recipients who reach time limits without meeting work requirements should be offered a chance to work in community service jobs in return for cash assistance. We found huge variation of welfare eligibility rights across states, depending on ability to pay and preferences to meet a certain level of social standard and other (social) objectives such as child care, work support and employment programs.welfare reform, poverty

Three Essays on the Effects of Childbearing on Economic Well-being and Health

Chapter 1: Couples in Turkey exhibit son preference through son-biased differential stopping behavior that does not cause a sex ratio imbalance in the population. Demand for sons leads to lower ratios of boys to girls in larger families but higher ratios in smaller families. Girls are born earlier than their male siblings, and son-biased fertility behavior is persistent in response to decline in fertility over time and across households with parents from different backgrounds. Parents use contraceptive methods to halt fertility following a male birth. The sibling sex composition is associated with gender disparities in health. Among third- or later-born children, female infant mortality is 1.5 percentage points lower if the previous sibling is male. The female survival advantage, however, disappears if the previous sibling is female. Having an older female sibling shifts the gender gap in infant mortality rate by 2 percentage points in favor of males. The improvement in infant mortality is strongest in favor of males who do not have an older male sibling. Chapter 2: My co-authors and I examine the causal of impact of increased fertility on labor market outcomes in Turkey. Because Turkish parents exhibit a strong preference for sons and there is no evidence of selective abortion in Turkey, we use female births in the first two parities as instruments for family size. Using the 2000 Census, we find that although OLS estimates indicate a negative effect of fertility on labor supply for women, there is no evidence that this effect is causal. For men we find a small positive increase in labor force participation when the first child born is female. Analyzing the characteristics of compliers (i.e. those parents whose fertility is influenced by having a preference for sons), we find little difference with the overall population, suggesting that the finding of no effect of fertility is likely to be generalizable to the overall population. Results from the 2004-2012 Household and Labor Force Survey confirm our results from the Census and also indicate that there is little impact of fertility on the intensive margin of labor supply (i.e. hours or wages). Chapter 3: A long-standing tension within the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program forWomen, Infants and Children or WIC is promotion of breastfeeding while making available free infant formula. The WIC program purchases over half of all infant formula sold in the US and unsurprisingly, breastfeeding initiation and duration is substantially lower among WIC participants than their eligible non-participants. In an effort to improve breastfeeding, the Oregon WIC Program tested whether a relatively low-cost telephone peer counseling initiative to support breastfeeding could increase the initiation and duration of exclusive breastfeeding among its participants. They conducted a large randomized field experiment (RFE) with over 1900 women from four WIC agencies in the state. They found significant increases in exclusive breastfeeding among Spanish- but not English-speaking clients. In this study, my co-authors and I use data from the RFE along with administrative data from the rest of the state to assess whether the results from the RFE can be extended to other agencies in the state. We use randomization as an instrument to estimate the effect of treatment on the treated and we compare these to non-experimental estimates of the effect of peer counseling from the same or similar WIC agencies as the RFE. We find small or non-existent effects of peer counseling in the non-experimental settings, which suggest that the experimental estimates may reflect Hawthorne effects. We present evidence of selection into RFE in that exclusive breastfeeding among the controls is significantly greater than among women who were offered but declined to participate in the RFE as well as from women in the rest of the state who had no access to peer counseling. We conclude that despite the strong internal validity of the RFE, extending the program to other agencies in the state would have a limited impact at best on exclusive breastfeeding

Increasing Access to Food: A Comprehensive Report on Food Supply Options

Access to food is one of the most important aspects of a healthy, sustainable community. Grocery stores and other suppliers can serve as an economic anchor to provide social benefits to communities. Unfortunately, many communities do not have convenient and/or affordable access to grocery items, particularly fresh produce. As part of Virginia Commonwealth University\u27s Fall 2019 graduate course on Urban Commercial Revitalization, class members researched 13 retail and other food access options, which are described in this report. Each chapter covers a food access option and provides basic information that will be useful to individuals, organizations, or government agencies that wish to attract and/or develop grocery operations in their communities

Video Creation Tools for Language Learning: Lessons Learned

Video creation tools—from Skype to PowerPoint to iMovie—have become increasingly popular conduits for foreign language teaching and learning. In flipped-classroom and blended-learning models, video enables faculty to move routine language concepts (i.e., grammar and vocabulary) outside the classroom, leaving more in-class time for live engagement with teacher and classmates. This chapter discusses lessons learned and new data collected at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries’ Weigle Information Commons on video’s effectiveness in various language learning contexts. Data collected includes reflections on several years of course observations, interviews with language faculty members, and a campus-wide survey to gauge student perspectives on video’s role in the language learning experience. Themes that have emerged include the range of video tools available to perform a given task, perceptions of tool usefulness and ease of use (depending on faculty and student technology comfort levels), and the role of the library as a central resource for technology support and course integration. Our study contributes to the scholarly conversation by providing a taxonomy of current tools used, their efficacy in our context as a measure for other contexts, and skills recommended by faculty and staff for effective incorporation of video tools in the language classroom

Governance arrangements for state owned enterprises

The aim of this paper is to shed new light on key challenges in governance arrangements for state owned enterprises in infrastructure sectors. The paper provides guidelines on how to classify the fuzzy and sometimes conflicting development goals of infrastructure and the governance arrangements needed to reach such goals. Three policy recommendations emerge. First, some of the structures implied by internationally adopted principles of corporate governance for state owned enterprises favoring a centralized ownership function versus a decentralized or dual structure have not yet been sufficiently"tested"in practice and may not suit all developing countries. Second, general corporate governance guidelines (and policy recommendations) need to be carefully adapted to infrastructure sectors, particularly in the natural monopoly segments. Because the market structure and regulatory arrangements in which state owned enterprises operate matters, governments may want to distinguish the state owned enterprises operating in potentially competitive sectors from the ones under a natural monopoly structure. Competition provides not only formidable benefits, but also unique opportunities for benchmarking, increasing transparency and accountability. Third, governments may want to avoid partial fixes, by tackling both the internal and external governance factors. Focusing only on one of the governance dimensions is unlikely to improve SOE performance in a sustainable way.National Governance,Banks&Banking Reform,Public Sector Economics&Finance,Debt Markets,Public Sector Expenditure Analysis&Management

Montana Kaimin, May 11, 1977

Student newspaper of the University of Montana, Missoula.https://scholarworks.umt.edu/studentnewspaper/7677/thumbnail.jp