Social Network Capital, Economic Mobility and Poverty Traps

The paper explores the role social network capital might play in facilitating poor agents’ escape from poverty traps. We model endogenous network formation among households heterogeneously endowed with both traditional and social network capital who make investment and technology choices over time in the absence of financial markets and faced with multiple production technologies featuring different fixed costs and returns. We show that social network capital can serve as either a complement to or a substitute for productive assets in facilitating some poor households’ escape from poverty. However, the voluntary nature of costly social network formation also creates both involuntary and voluntary exclusionary mechanisms that impede some poor households’ efforts to exit poverty. The ameliorative potential of social networks therefore depends fundamentally on the underlying wealth distribution in the economy. In some settings, targeted public transfers to the poor can crowd-in private resources by inducing new social links that the poor can exploit to escape from poverty

Pharmacological treatment of asthma in a cohort of adults during a 20-year period: results from the European Community Respiratory Health Survey I, II and III

Asthma often remains uncontrolled, despite the fact that the pharmacological treatment has undergone large changes. We studied changes in the treatment of asthma over a 20-year period and identified factors associated with the regular use of inhaled corticosteroid (ICS) treatment. Changes in the use of medication were determined in 4617 randomly selected subjects, while changes in adults with persistent asthma were analysed in 369 participants. The study compares data from three surveys in 24 centres in 11 countries. The use of ICSs increased from 1.7% to 5.9% in the general population and the regular use of ICSs increased from 19% to 34% among persistent asthmatic subjects. The proportion of asthmatic subjects reporting asthma attacks in the last 12 months decreased, while the proportion that had seen a doctor in the last 12 months remained unchanged (42%). Subjects with asthma who had experienced attacks or had seen a doctor were more likely to use ICSs on a regular basis. Although ICS use has increased, only one-third of subjects with persistent asthma take ICSs on a regular basis. Less than half had seen a doctor during the last year. This indicates that underuse of ICSs and lack of regular healthcare contacts remains a problem in the management of asthma