Economic Consequences of Health Status: A Review of the Evidence

The correlation between health and economic performance is extremely robust across communities and over time. Many factors exogenous to income play an important role in determining health status, including a number of geographical, environmental, and evolutionary factors. This suggests the existence of simultaneous impacts of health on wealth and wealth on health. Potential health impacts on national economic performance are explored, and some important unanswered questions are identified.health, economic growth, human capital

Indirect Effects of Direct Election: A Structural Examination of the Seventh Amendment

Federalism is hot. Courts are trying to preserve it.\u27 Politicians are trying to reinvent it. And academics are trying just to understand it. Inspired by this renewed interest in the relationship between federal and state governments, I decided to undertake a fresh examination of the Seventeenth Amendment which requires direct election-by the People of each State-of members of the United States Senate. After all, although direct election has not received extensive academic attention, the amendment\u27s removal of state legislatures from the federal electoral process would seem to have significantly reworked the Constitution\u27s federal framework; state legislative election of Senators was seen in 1787 as a (if not the) central device for the protection of States\u27 rights and interests. And in fairly short order I identified some currently important federalism implications of the amendment. For example, much of the current flack over unfunded federal mandates and federal conscription of state instrumentalities is, I think, a result of state legislatures having been cut out of the electoral loop. But as my structural inquiry into direct election became more systematic, I came to see that some of the Seventeenth Amendment\u27s most important and heretofore unobserved implications concern not federalism, but rather separation of powers-the relationships and processes of the three co-equal federal branches. Although it does so indirectly, the Seventeenth Amendment alters and casts important light on the dynamic between organs within the federal government. As James Madison keenly suggested in Federalist No. 51,11 the two great themes of the Constitution\u27s design-federalism and separation of powers-are intricately and interestingly related., And when we enact structural changes in one of these two areas, we simply cannot ignore the spillover effects in the other. In this Article, I identify and begin to explore three ways in which direct election bears on important separation of powers questions. First, I argue that direct election systematically reduces rotation between the Senate and Executive Branch offices. This is so because involvement of the People of each State makes more difficult deals by which Senators leave the Senate voluntarily to perform other public service on the implicit understanding that they will be reelected to the Senate when openings present themselves. Put another way, because the Seventeenth Amendment introduces new transaction costs, certain kinds of rotation arrangements have be- come harder to fashion

Evaluating six sigma in the Indonesian SME context

Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs) make an important contribution to the Indonesian economy and are a focus of Government attention aimed at improving their efficiency and competitiveness. In this paper we discuss the development of a research project to investigate the suitability of lean six sigma as an improvement methodology for Indonesian SMEs in the manufacturing sector. A key aim of the research is to design a suitable framework for introducing lean six sigma into Indonesian SMEs in the manufacturing sector

Comment on ``Solidification of a Supercooled Liquid in a Narrow Channel''

Comment on PRL v. 86, p. 5084 (2001) [cond-mat/0101016]. We point out that the authors' simulations are consistent with the known theory of steady-state solutions in this system

Economic Consequences of Health Status: A Review of the Evidence

The correlation between health and economic performance is extremely robust across communities and over time. Many factors exogenous to income play an important role in determining health status, including a number of geographical, environmental, and evolutionary factors. This suggests the existence of simultaneous impacts of health on wealth and wealth on health. Potential health impacts on national economic performance are explored, and some important unanswered questions are identified

Extending the scope of microscopic solvability: Combination of the Kruskal-Segur method with Zauderer decomposition

Successful applications of the Kruskal-Segur approach to interfacial pattern formation have remained limited due to the necessity of an integral formulation of the problem. This excludes nonlinear bulk equations, rendering convection intractable. Combining the method with Zauderer's asymptotic decomposition scheme, we are able to strongly extend its scope of applicability and solve selection problems based on free boundary formulations in terms of partial differential equations alone. To demonstrate the technique, we give the first analytic solution of the problem of velocity selection for dendritic growth in a forced potential flow.Comment: Submitted to Europhys. Letters, No figures, 5 page

The Changing Global Distribution of Malaria: A Review

Organized efforts to reduce the burden of malaria are as old as human societies. Understanding the historical relationships between humankind and malaria is important for natural and social scientists studying the disease, as well as policy makers trying to control it. Malaria once extended widely throughout the old world, reaching as far north as 64ºN latitude and as far south as 32ºS latitude. Today, however, malaria is almost exclusively a problem of the geographical tropics. Analysis of historical changes in malaria prevalence suggests a number of factors which help to determine the likelihood and sustainability of success in malaria control. Among these are geography, evolutionary history of flora and fauna, infrastructure, and land use. It is due to these factors, much more than socio-economic ones, that attempts to control or interrupt transmission of the disease have historically been most successful on islands, in temperate climates, or at high elevations