Animal welfare in a global perspective

Global survey of animal-welfare regulations, practices and perceptions, with case studies on poultry meat from Brazil and Thailand, eggs from India and the USA, welfare regulations of farmed fish and welfare aspects related to (perceived) overpopulation of wildlif

Viewpoint on handling anti-TNF failure in psoriasis

An association among the occurrence of antidrug antibodies (ADAs), diminished trough serum drug levels (TSDLs) and non-response or loss of response has been described for several tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF) blocking agents in a variety of diseases, including psoriasis. In a series of ten psoriasis patients with primary or secondary failure, or adverse reactions during anti-TNF therapy, we measured ADAs and TSDLs in patient serum using radioimmunoassay and ELISA, respectively. By proposing a treatment algorithm derived from research in this field, we show that measuring ADAs and TSDLs in psoriasis patients provides a more structured approach to clinical decision making for psoriasis patients who fail anti-TNF therapy

Channels of international risk-sharing: capital gains versus income flows

Global financial integration unlocks a huge potential for international risk sharing. We examine the degree to which international equity holdings act as a risk sharing device in industrial and emerging economies. We split equity returns into investment income (dividend distribution) and capital gains to investigate which of the two channels delivers the largest potential for risk sharing. Our evidence suggests that net capital gains are a more potent channel of risk sharing. They behave in a countercyclical way, that is they tend to be positive (negative) when the domestic economy is growing more slowly (rapidly) than the rest of the world. Countries with more countercyclical net capital gains experience improved consumption risk sharing. The empirical analysis furthermore suggests that these risk sharing properties of net capital gains have increased through time, in particular in the 1990s and early-2000s, on the back of a declining equity home bias and financial market deepening. JEL Classification: F21, F30, F36consumption smoothing, Cross-Border Investment, International portfolio diversification, International risk sharing, Valuation effects

Patterns of Current Account Adjustment – Insights from Past Experience

The paper examines episodes of current account adjustment in individual economies. A central finding is that these episodes are very divergent and can be usefully classified, on the basis of cluster analysis, in three groups. A majority of cases is characterised by internal adjustment, exhibiting slowing domestic demand growth. In some cases, the adjustment was mainly external, facilitated by an exchange rate depreciation but without economic slowdown. Finally, some cases involved a crisis-like combination of a severe slowdown and a significant currency depreciation. Using a multinomial logit, we find that this classification of episodes helps improve the predictability of current account adjustment.external imbalances, current account adjustment, cluster analysis, multinomial logit

The institutional foundations of medicalization : a cross-national analysis of mental health and unemployment

In this study, we question (1) whether the relationship between unemployment and mental healthcare use, controlling for mental health status, varies across European countries and (2) whether these differences are patterned by a combination of unemployment and healthcare generosity. We hypothesize that medicalization of unemployment is stronger in countries where a low level of unemployment generosity is combined with a high level of healthcare generosity. A subsample of 36,306 working-age respondents from rounds 64.4 (2005-2006) and 73.2 (2010) of the cross-national survey Eurobarometer was used. Country-specific logistic regression and multilevel analyses, controlling for public disability spending, changes in government spending, economic capacity, and unemployment rate, were performed. We find that unemployment is medicalized, at least to some degree, in the majority of the 24 nations surveyed. Moreover, the medicalization of unemployment varies substantially across countries, corresponding to the combination of the level of unemployment and of healthcare generosity

From politics to nostalgia: the transformation of war memories in France during the 1960-1970s

This article discusses changes in collective memory of World War Two in France during the 1960s—1970s on the basis of a contextualized discussion of three films, all of which adopt, it is argued, a self-conscious politics of memory. The films are taken as examples of a particular relationship to World War Two that was historically possible in a given political context. As in most of the literature, ‘the 1968 years’ are taken as a moment of change, but it is argued here that they constituted the end rather than the start of a series of political challenges to collective memory of World War Two. During the 1970s representations of World War Two in cinema as well as public discourse more generally were increasingly historicized and disconnected from contemporary society, and thus de-politicized

The moving boundaries in starting materials: from small molecules to biopharma and ATMPs

Several guidelines (e.g. ICH) define starting materials for a medicinal drug substance. While a consensus approach for defining the starting material in the synthesis of small molecule API is currently more or less being agreed upon due to the straightforward production process and well characterized API structure, this is not so as the drug nature complicates, e.g. biopharma and Advanced Therapy Medicinal Products (ATMPs). Although some general guidelines are present, Regulatory Authorities and pharmaceutical manufacturers should establish clear approaches for starting material definitions for these complicated APIs, as this will speed up the development and approval process for the benefit of the patient

Gender inequalities and depression

More gender-equal societies promote better mental health among both men and women and reduce the gender gap in depressive symptom