Global Aging and Economic Convergence: A Real Option or Still a Case of Science Fiction?

How does global aging affect the convergence in global economic development? Both the developing and developed world will be characterized for the coming decades by aging populations. Changes in the age distribution of a population are an important determinant of economic performance as they affect wealth accumulation and dependency burdens, yielding a demographic dividend of extra growth. During the twenty years from 1975 to 2005 Europe and the US have benefited from a strong demographic dividend. However, in the decades to come this effect will be reversed and the driving force behind the wealth of nations has to be sought elsewhere. Africa and, to some extent, India might benefit from the demographic dividend. However, this potential growth phase may well disappear if supporting conditions for growth are absent. Large-scale migration is not expected to be a sustainable solution to unbalanced global economic developments. Remittances, Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and Official Development Assistance (ODA) will remain necessary capital flows for the developing world in the near future. Remittances offer no structural solution to reduction of poverty as these funds flow to a selective group of families and are allocated generally to consumption rather than to investment purposes. Migration of a temporary nature in conjunction with offshore outsourcing of services and production may offer a solution for the dilemmas of population and development, which OECD donors face in offering development assistance and designing immigration policy

When Health Care Insurance Does Not Make A Difference – The Case of Health Care ‘Made in China’

Does medical insurance affect health care demand and in the end contribute to improvements in the health status? Evidence for China for the year 2004, by means of the China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS), shows that health insurance does not affect health care demand in a significant manner. Counterfactuals suggest that full insurance coverage of the Chinese population will not radically change the health care decisions and may even enlarge the perverse effects of today’s health care system: insured persons are more likely to fall back on self-care when they are injured or ill than on the care of a local clinic. This effect is particularly strong in urban areas. In case of a severe injury hospital consultation is preferred to local clinic or self-care by most people, but still a substantial percentage (20 percent) resorts to self-care or ignores the illness. The high level of out-of-pocket expenses paid by both insured and uninsured patients lies at t! he root of this problem. Insurance does not offer real protection against unpredictable high health care expenditures and can lead people into a position of long-term poverty or serious liquidity problems

Who Carries the Burden of Reproductive Health and AIDS Programs? - Evidence from OECD Donor Countries

This paper tries to establish who carries the burden in supporting reproductive health and AIDS programs worldwide. The 1994 International Conference of Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo established goals for the expansion of assistance in matters of reproductive health and AIDS. This global effort has so far not sufficiently been supported by funds and this paper looks at what lies behind the level of funds and the sharing of financial burdens. Panel data on expenditures for population and AIDS activities funded by 21 donor countries for the years 1983-2002 are examined by means of dynamic panel data estimation. On an aggregated scale small donors 'exploit' the large donors: large donors give more resources than their 'fair share', i.e. their income weight in the group of donors. However, this picture is not true for the finance and support for multilateral organizations where every donor country pays its fair share. The exploitation hypothesis is true for the cases of bilateral aid and NGOs. The exploitation model gives however a partial view of what determines the sharing of burdens. To understand burden sharing across countries fully one needs to take account of the most dominant religions in a country, the pro-foreign aid stance of a government and the government size. Donor countries are not much affected in their funding behavior by the state of development of the least developed countries

What Drives Donor Funding in Population Assistance Programs?

The 1994 International Conference of Population and Development (ICPD) established goals for the expansion of population assistance. This global effort has so far not sufficiently been supported by donor funds. Dynamic panel estimation methods are used to see what lies behind the sharing of burdens and level of donor contributions. Panel data on expenditures for population and AIDS activities have been collected for 21 donor countries for the years 1996-2002. Donor countries are willing to contribute to the ICPD agenda, but those contributions depend heavily on national interests and preferences and to a lesser extent on the development state of less developed countries. Political opportunism in the timing of funds is not strong. With respect to the sharing of the ICPD burden within the group of OECD/DAC countries one can say that on an aggregated scale the burden of population assistance programs is in line with the ability to pay of donor countries. Differences in funding are more connected to other factors such as the size of governments, the state of development of a country and the dominant religions in donor countries

Is there such a Thing called Scientific Waste?

Science is a winner-take-all profession in which only few contributions get excessive attention and the large majority of papers remains receives scant or no attention. This so-called ‘waste’ together with all the competitive strategies of scientists seeking attention is part and parcel of any creative profession and not a worrisome fact as the price society pays for human ingenuity is extremely small: 0.0006 percent of world income goes into the publication of scientific research. The more worrisome features of competition in academic economics reveal themselves not through ordinary citation or publication statistics or competitive attention seeking strategies. The badly designed use of market principles in which citations and publications have become the sol

Early retirement reform: Can it work? Will it work?

Early retirement from the labour force has become standard practice for most employees in the industrialised world. However, as a result of the rising costs of early retirement schemes, curbing the outflow of older workers from the labour force has become a central government policy objective. Early retirement reforms under which benefits are financed on a more actuarially neutral basis are currently being implemented in the Netherlands. At present it is not clear how older workers will react to these policy reforms. In this paper we examine the extent to which (Dutch) older workers are inclined to change their retirement intentions in response to new early retirement arrangements. On the basis of a labour market and a population survey we examine retirement intentions under alternative early retirement policies. The overall conclusion is that the retirement reform may lead to a substantial delay of the retirement date, but that in practice more forces than the financial incentives are at work. This is also reflected in the long-run early retirement trend. This trend presents demographers and economists with a puzzle because a break shows up in the time series but this break has set in before the actual early retirement reforms were put into practice

Attention and the Art of Scientific Publishing

Attention is the coordination device, which makes modern science work the way it does. A typical characteristic of attention in the scientific world is that those who seek attention are the same people who are giving it. Another important feature within groups is the skewed distribution of attention. We discuss the effect these characteristics have on scientific institutions. An important thesis is that scientists converge in clusters of likeminded scientists. Given the character of scientific organisation and communication we expect that the digitalisation of scientific communication will not affect the basic scientific institutions as the principles upon which the Internet and open source code projects function coincide more or less with the way science functions

Signals in Science - On the Importance of Signaling in Gaining Attention in Science

Which signals are important in gaining attention in science? For a group of 1,371 scientific articles published in 17 demography journals in the years 1990-1992 we track their influence and discern which signals are important in receiving citations. Three types of signals are examined: the author’s reputation (as producer of the idea), the journal (as the broker of the idea), and the state of uncitedness (as an indication of the assessment by the scientific community of an idea). The empirical analysis points out that, first, the reputation of journals plays an overriding role in gaining attention in science. Second, in contrast to common wisdom, the state of uncitedness does not affect the future probability of being cited. And third, the reputation of a journal may help to get late recognition (so-called ‘sleeping beauties’) as well as generate so-called ‘flash-in-the-pans’: immediately noted articles but apparently not very influential in the long run

What makes a Scientific Article influential?

In this paper we examine, by means of a citation analysis, which factors influence the impact of articles published in demography journals between 1990 and 1992. Several quantifiable characteristics of the articles (characteristics with respect to authors, visibility, content and journals) are strongly related to their subsequent impact in the social sciences. Articles are most frequently cited when they deal with empirical, ahistorical research focusing on populations in the developed world, when they are prominently placed in a journal issue, when they are written in English and when they appear in core demography journals. Furthermore, although eminent scholars are likely to be cited on the basis of their reputation, the effect of reputation appears to be small in demography