Regional socioeconomic indicators and ethnicity as predictors of regional infant mortality rate in Slovakia

OBJECTIVE: Exploring the associations of regional differences in infant mortality with selected socioeconomic indicators and ethnicity could offer important clues for designing public health policy measures. METHODS: Data included perinatal and infant mortality in the 79 districts of the Slovak population in 2004. Linear regression was used to analyse the contribution of education, unemployment, income and proportion of Roma population on regional differences in perinatal and infant mortality rates. RESULTS: All the explored socioeconomic indicators and ethnicity individually contributed significantly to both perinatal and infant mortality, with the exception of income. In the model exploring the influence of all these variables together on perinatal and infant mortality, only the effect of the proportion of Roma population remained significant. This model explained 34.9% of the variance for perinatal and 36.4% of the variance for infant mortality. CONCLUSIONS: Living in Roma settlements indicates an accumulation of socioeconomic disadvantage. Health literacy, health-related behaviour and many other factors might contribute to the explanation of the differences in infant mortality, and a better understanding of these processes might help us to design tailored interventions

The Impact of Czech Privatisation Methods on Enterprise Performance Incorporating Initial Selection Bias Correction

Governments with transitional economies have applied different privatisation methods, from an almost free distribution to the direct sales of state assets. While a free distribution was believed to ensure the political feasibility of the program and its fairness, direct sales, or more generally, standard privatisation methods had a significant advantage in creating concentrated ownership structures as the prerequisite to corporate control and restructuring. Many economists believe that the two goals of mass privatisation, political feasibility and creation of proper ownership incentives, contradict each other and recent empirical comparisons of enterprises seem to support their view. However, all empirical works have been based on the weak assumption that privatisation methods were applied on a randomly selected samples of enterprises, which then allowed for a direct comparison between these enterprises. Our main claim is that governments indeed selected enterprises non-randomly and therefore, the resulting selection bias must be incorporated into the analyses. To show this, we apply a Heckman two-step regression method on a sample of 559 Czech enterprises. The main point of this paper then is that performance is influenced by the selection process and combination of vouchers with outsider owners is preferred over 100% voucherisation.