Health care expenditure disparities in the European Union and underlying factors: a distribution dynamics approach

This paper examines health care expenditure (HCE) disparities between the European Union countries over the period 1995-2010. By means of using a continuous version of the distribution dynamics approach, the key conclusions are that the reduction in disparities is very weak and, therefore, persistence is the main characteristic of the HCE distribution. In view of these findings, a preliminary attempt is made to add some insights into potentially main factors behind the HCE distribution. The results indicate that whereas per capita income is by far the main determinant, the dependency ratio and female labour participation do not play any role in explaining the HCE distribution; as for the rest of the factors studied (life expectancy, infant mortality, R&D expenditure and public HCE expenditure share), we find that their role falls somewhat in between

Forecasting prices of dairy commodities – a comparison of linear and nonlinear models

peer reviewedDairy commodity prices have become more volatile over the last 10–11 yr. The aim of this paper was to produce reliable price forecasts for the most frequently traded dairy commodities. Altogether five linear and nonlinear time series models were applied. The analysis reveals that prices of dairy commodities reached a structural breakpoint in 2006/2007. The results also show that a combination of linear and nonlinear models is useful in forecasting commodity prices. In this study, the price of cheese is the most difficult to forecast, but a simple autoregressive (AR) model performs reasonably well after 12 mo. Similarly, for butter the AR model performs the best, while for skimmed milk powder (Smp), whole milk powder (Wmp) and whey powder (Whp) the nonlinear methods are the most accurate. However, few of the differences between models are significant according to the Diebold–Mariano (DM) test. The findings could be of interest to the whole dairy industry