International price transmission on soft wheat markets: which role for policy variables in cointegration relationships?

This paper aims at considering policy regimes while studying international price transmission mechanisms. The focus is on the soft wheat market between the United States and the European Union in the years 1978-2003. EU domestic and border policies are expected to play a strong role; a theoretical framework is developed in which the basic idea is that the intervention price acts as a threshold above which the EU and the US price can interact. A composite variable, equal to the maximum between the intervention and the US price, is then introduced in a cointegration model and its relation with the EU price is studied. In addition to this, other models are estimated, in which the adjustment coefficients and the parameters of the cointegrating vector are allowed to vary according to the policy regime in place. All models yield consistent results. The EU price reaction to the long run relations suggests that the role of the US price can be understood only if policy regimes are adequately accounted for. To which extent the US price adjusts to disequilibria requires further research.International price transmission, Cointegration, Common Agricultural Policy, Agricultural and Food Policy, International Relations/Trade,

Agricultural Price Transmission Across Space and Commodities During Price Bubbles

This paper analyses the horizontal transmission of cereal price shocks both across different market places and across different commodities. The analysis is carried out using Italian and international weekly spot (cash) price data and concentrating the attention on years 2006-2010, a period of generalized exceptional exuberance and consequent rapid drop of agricultural prices. The work aims at investigating how price transmission may be affected during price bubbles. The properties of price time series are firstly explored to assess which data generation process may have eventually produced the observed patterns. Secondly, the interdependence across prices is specified and estimated adopting appropriate cointegration techniques.Price Transmission, Price Bubbles, Time Series Properties, Cointegration, Demand and Price Analysis, Q110, C320,

Making the world market price endogenous within the AGMEMOD modelling framework: an econometric solution

This paper aims at making the world price endogenous within the AGMEMOD modelling approach. This approach constructs country-level commodity market models where supply and demand sides are equalized on the basis of the observed domestic prices. These prices are endogenous as they depend (price transmission equation) on a EU key-price, which is, in turn, endogenously determined by the world price (price formation equation). The world prices, however, are assumed to be exogenous. To make the world price endogenous, we propose a system of equations where the EU key-price and the world price are simultaneously determined. This system of equations, written in a dynamic and error-correction form (VECM), substitutes the usual price-formation equation, while price transmission across EU countries remains unaffected. This approach is here applied to the case of soft wheat and results compared to those obtained by using the conventional AGMEMOD approach.Price Formation and Transmission, Commodity Market Models, VECM, Demand and Price Analysis, Research Methods/ Statistical Methods, Q110, Q170,

Environmental and Public Health Risks from Air Pollution at the Beijing 2008 Olympics

China  has   made  enormous  strides  in   tackling  its  environmental  problems,  but considerable work remains to be done.  In an article on environment and public health published in the Winter 2007 edition of this journal, the question was raised whether the forces unleashed by China’s aggressive approach to economic growth since the late 1970’s --- two to three times the global average --- were too strong to be controlled by its environmental policies.  The same question remains relative to health risks for the Summer Olympics this August (2008):  “The main problem appears to be that well intentioned public health and environmental policies have not yet been realistically integrated into overall policies which emphatically promote economic growth.”1    In other words, theory and practice are in conflict and in practice, China has been promoting objectives that are diametrically opposed.  In August, 2007, China conducted a dry run of procedures to control air pollution by restricting car use.   The results were hard to interpret: official websites claimed success, while other observers and official data showed varied results of successful pollution reduction (see below). Overwhelmingly the major health as well as environmental concern for Beijing is air pollution and solutions have concentrated on the city itself, but surrounding areas are also problematic and have not been addressed as well.  This article will look at the health risks to athletes and the preparations that the Chinese government has been making to forestall widespread air pollution for the games.  One of the main reasons Beijing was chosen for the 2008 Olympics over Toronto and Paris was its proposals to have a “green Olympics.

Do Price Uncertainties Affect the Use of Policy Flexibilities? The Selection of Sensitive Products in WTO Agricultural Negotiations

In a context in which price uncertainty is likely to increase, expected market trends need to be taken carefully into account while negotiating international trade policy rules. This paper aims at analyzing what is their influence on the use of policy flexibilities in the context of WTO agricultural negotiations. In particular, within the market access pillar, we focus on the selection of sensitive products. Our model, TRIMAG (Tariff Reduction Impact Model for Agriculture), defined at the 8-digit level, optimizes the domestic agricultural value added subject to a maximum number of sensitive tariff lines, accounting for various future international price scenarios. Furthermore, we test the use of alternative options for the implementation of “tariff simplification”. Findings confirm that the future expected development of world and domestic prices plays an important role in the selection of sensitive products, and that tariff simplification doesn’t affect the results, if provisions to ensure the neutrality of the exercise are put in place. Furthermore, TRIMAG can be considered as a tariff aggregation tool that can be linked to agricultural simulation models that operate at a higher level of aggregation.WTO agricultural negotiations, market access, sensitive products, International Relations/Trade, F13, Q17,

Hospital procedures concentration: how to combine quality and patient choice.

The main focus of this PhD thesis is the use of managerial tools in the healthcare sector. In particular, the principal topic we focus on is the volume-outcome association, a relationship that has been empirically identifed in medical specialties. According to this relationship, there exists a positive association between the number of interventions (the so called volume of activity) performed by a facility and the quality of clinical outcomes, measured in terms of patients’ health conditions. The volume-outcome association has been identifed back in 1979, and it has been particularly documented in the last two decades for a variety of interventions and different outcome measures. All the studies mainly reveal that there is a positive effect of volume on outcomes for each medical procedure, although its extent varies depending on the clinical area itself. The observed trend can be explained by two main factors: (i) on a hospital level, the structure by which care is organised is likely to be poorer in low volume hospitals, which might lack consistent processes for postoperative care or for dealing with ostoperative complications; (ii) on a personnel level, outcomes may also be related to the familiarity of the staff with the treatment. Despite the number of studies focusing on it, the volume–outcome association still raises interest, due to the persistence of low volumes performed in healthcare facilities, in particular in Italian hospitals. Our starting point is the National Outcome Evaluation Program (PNE), a project sponsored by the Italian government that each year, from 2012, reports hospitals clinical performances with the objective to assess healthcare service quality levels. While many researchers have focused on the existence of the volume-outcome association from a clinical perspective, this PhD project deepens the volume-outcome association from a managerial perspective, by including it in a planning problem. The planning problem analysed consists in the decision of how to distribute volumes of activity among wards of hospitals perating in a same geographical area. In particular, among the different specialties, we consider surgery wards, since better results for higher volumes are especially plausible for this case. Our ultimate bjective is to exploit the information contained within the volume–outcome association and, as a consequence of the existing link among volume and outcomes, to reach an optimal planning for hospital wards. In this way, the reorganization of hospitals operating in a territory (planning decision) translates into the improvement of healthcare organization outcomes (clinical result). We take as reference healthcare system the Italian National Healthcare System (Servizio Sanitario Nazionale, SSN), a public health system that provides universal coverage for comprehensive and essential health services. The formulation of our problem varies depending on which actor is considered. In the SSN, there is a central decision maker, the commissioner, in charge of guaranteeing the compliance with the principles of universality, equality and equity. It is represented by an institutional figure at the national level, i.e., the Ministry of Health. However, all the administrative levels (e.g., Regions, municipalities, etc.) have to ollaborate in order to guarantee health quality to all the citizens. Hence, we can think of a commissioner at each layer of the system, which is responsible for the population health. Beyond the commissioner, other actors compose the Italian healthcare system. In particular, three other categories are involved in planning problems: providers, physicians and patients. Commissioners emand to providers to supply healthcare services. Providers (i.e., hospital administrators) answer through the supply of the requested services. Medical staff (surgeons, anesthetists, nurses, etc.) are the experts who deal with patients, who in turn receive the service. It should be noticed that there is no constraint enforcing patients to choose a specifc hospital where to be treated, and no patient is forced to receive healthcare services. Each actor has its own interests and perspectives, and therefore it is relevant to keep into consideration their different behaviors and interactions. Since the allocation of operation volumes to healthcare structures is a strategic decision that deals with territorial healthcare confguration and people health needs, we initially take the perspective of the commissioner, who is the first actor involved in this decision process. All the other actors will face the consequences of such strategic choice: providers will have to adapt the capacity of their structures to the new planned demand; medical staff will have to arrange new shifts and work organisation; patients will face new openings/closures of hospitals and will have to choose where to be treated. Among them, we reckoned as particularly worthy of attention the patients’ perspective, since their behaviour can alter the whole commissioner plan. The thesis is structured as follows. Chapter 2 summarizes the relevant literature. The chapter is organized in two sections dedicated to the two main felds of studies we refer to, namely location and allocation problems (from the health management literature) and choice models (from the health economics literature). Moreover, a section of the chapter reports the state of the art of the researches that have been conducted on the volume–outcome association. Chapter 3 is dedicated to the policy maker’s perspective. We take the point of view of the commissioners, i.e., that of planning the volume to be allocated to each hospital, and we propose an approach (based on mathematical programming) to determine the number of interventions to be strategically allocated to surgery wards, given several constraints related to hospital capacity, demand satisfaction and pidemiological concerns. Concentration vs. scattering of interventions among healthcare structures are explored in terms of quality and equity offered to the whole population. The proposed approach is tested on four case studies taking into account real life factors (such as reallocation of interventions, geographical distribution of hospitals, volume threshold constraints, and dissimilarities among hospital performances), and results are compared with real data from the PNE. Chapter 4 focuses on patients’ perspective. Specifcally, we analysed patients’ choice, in terms of hospital where they have decided to be treated, together with the list of hospitals that were available to them. By using the econometric methodology of the conditional logit, we modeled the trade-off faced by patients between hospitals’ characteristics, i.e., distance and quality. Eventually, we applied the choice model to Hospital Discharge Data for colon cancer patients in Piedmont from 2004 to 2014, showing patients’ revealed preferences. Results shed some light on how patients can react to facility specialization or closure, depending on demographic, social and clinical factors. Chapter 5 gathers the two perspectives and merge them. The objective is to support planning decisions that (i) are effective in terms of better health outcomes and (ii) guarantee patients’ choices to respect the volumes that have been strategically planned. To this aim, we explored two distinct approaches. The frst approach enriches the one proposed in Chapter 3 with the commissioner point of view, by adding constraints involving patients, e.g., the maximum distance they are willing to travel. The second approach, instead, aims to fully integrate patients’ and policy maker’s perspectives, by inserting predictions on patients’ behaviour within the decisional process of the policy maker. Eventually, results from all the approaches are compared, in terms of organizational quality and population health

Is China Ready for the Mantel of International Leadership?

In the past few years China has crossed two colossal crossroads.  It is now the world’s largest emitter of CO2 (2006/7)  and held the summer Olympics (2008).   And China shares a curious distinction with many other of the world’s “old” civilizations in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Central and Latin America.  By today’s standards, they are considered developing countries, a designation that appears singularly objectionable to the Chinese.  But a designation that appears to be a significant driving force in China’s overriding policy fostering economic growth.  This article is a follow-up to two earlier articles published in this journal: “Is China Subordinating Health and Environmental Concerns to Economic Growth?” (Winter 2007) and “Environmental and Public Health Risks from Air Pollution at the Beijing 2008 Olympics” (Summer 2008).  Both articles open the door to ask “Is China Ready for the Mantel of International Leadership?”

Is China Subordinating Health and Environmental Concerns to Economic Growth?

The popular press frequently portrays China in a negative light when it reports on environmental and health issues: widespread air and water pollution, mine accidents, and contaminated imports such as food and toys.  The image is hardly positive.  How much of this accurately reflects reality, and how much reflects a tendency of the popular press to accentuate the negative?  Is the image the same in professional journals and technical reports

Hospital volume allocation: integrating decision maker and patient perspectives

Planning problems in healthcare systems have received greater attention in the last decade, especially because of the concerns recently raised about the scattering of surgical interventions among a wide number of different facilities that can undermine the quality of the outcome due to the volume-outcome association. In this paper, an approach to plan the amount of surgical interventions that a facility has to perform to assure a low adjusted mortality rate is proposed. The approach explicitly takes into account the existing interaction among patients’ choices and decision makers’ planning decisions. The first objective of the proposed approach is to find a solution able to reach quality in health outcomes and patients’ adherence. The second objective is to investigate the difference among solutions that are identified as optimal by either only one of the actors’ perspective, i.e., decision makers and patients, or by considering both the perspectives simultaneously. Following these objectives, the proposed approach is applied to a case study on Italian colon cancer interventions performed in 2014. Results confirm a variation in the hospital planned volumes when considering patients’ behaviour together with the policy maker plan, especially due to personal preferences and lack of information about hospital quality

Full-length genomes molecular investigation of Infectious Bronchitis Virus strains

Infectious Bronchitis virus (IBV) is one of the most important pathogen for poultry, and is ubiquitous in most parts of the world. Despite the advances in sequencing techniques, a wide collection of full-length sequences and a comprehensive understanding of the mutation affecting IBV virulence are still lacking. In the first part of the project, we obtained and analyzed the complete sequence of a Q1 strain isolated in Italy in 2013 in order to have more information on the genetic characteristics and the origin of this strain. The results of this study led to the hypothesis that the Q1 genotype was genetically related to the genotype 624I circulating in Italy from the 1960s. The full-length analysis of a 624I IBV strain isolated in Italy in 1996 was carried out in order to find out genetic correlations between Q1 and 624I genotypes. Results strongly suggest that 624I genotype has played an important role in the emerge and evolution of Q1 genotype. Findings support the hypothesis that elects 624I genotype as Q1 ancestor and suggest that 624I genotype was introduced in China somewhere in the past, there evolved into Q1 genotype, before its reintroduction in Italy. In the second part of the project the complete genome sequences of a QX genotype vaccine and its progenitor strain were obtained and analyzed in order to determine vaccines markers, thereby enabling detection on farms and to investigate the changes occurred during the attenuation process