Review and Evaluation of Agricultural Policies in Years 2015-2017

This journal article describes main results of the OECD Annual Report published in 2018, titled “Review and evaluation of agricultural policy in 2017” for 51 selected countries in the world, including Vietnam. The report is closely prepared by MARD and OECD experts. The journal article emphasizes more on Vietnam by updating and adjusting data, information and policies in 2017 and 2018. The description presents the changing trend of agricultural policies applied in the world, considering whether this trend is in the direction of achieving sustainable productivity growth, environmental protection, and adaptation to climate change. On average in the last 20 years, trend of world policies has been better but far to catch above purposes. The development of international trade has made the commodity movement more freely and price gaps narrowed between countries and regions. This trend made agricultural markets developed more toward reflecting the scarcity of good and services. Average level of total agricultural supports has been reducing. Consequently, the world price indices and the total support have been converted between countries and commodities. However, the total agricultural support reduction is mainly in developed countries like OECD countries. Emerging and developing countries have increased their agricultural supports. Relative to GDP, the level of the total agriculture support in Vietnam has been reducing.Inside the total agricultural support, producer supports accounted 78% while general service support accounted only for 14%. Inside the producer support, market price support accounted for more than 50% in many countries. Payments based on outputs and inputs also accounted more than 50% in many countries. In Vietnam, the producer support is very small, negative level in 2015 and 2016 and became positive in 2017 and 2018. The agricultural producer support in 2017 is about 900 million USD. In the overall service support, many countries mainly invest in infrastructure construction, for example in Japan and Vietnam over 70%, while investments in other items are too small, for example that in Vietnam is only about 16%.In conclusion, OECD suggests that market price support should be reduced and finally eliminated. Similarly, output and input payments should be reduced and eliminated. Future policies should focus on general support service that helps producers to achieve sustainable productivity growth in the context of a changing and uncertain climate. OECD especially emphasizes on appropriate investments in research, together with efforts to ensure that the outputs of this research reach farmers. OECD also emphasizes on research that help producers to better manage risks including business risk, weather risk, and climate changes. Agricultural production and climate changes are strongly interacted. Future research should be the better co-operation between public and private sectors with the leading role of public sector. The future research should be co-operated more strongly between countries and regions because of the differences in histories, cultures, geology and climate

Research Trends in Evidence-Based Medicine: A Joinpoint Regression Analysis of More than 50 Years of Publication Data

Background Evidence-based medicine (EBM) has developed as the dominant paradigm of assessment of evidence that is used in clinical practice. Since its development, EBM has been applied to integrate the best available research into diagnosis and treatment with the purpose of improving patient care. In the EBM era, a hierarchy of evidence has been proposed, including various types of research methods, such as meta-analysis (MA), systematic review (SRV), randomized controlled trial (RCT), case report (CR), practice guideline (PGL), and so on. Although there are numerous studies examining the impact and importance of specific cases of EBM in clinical practice, there is a lack of research quantitatively measuring publication trends in the growth and development of EBM. Therefore, a bibliometric analysis was constructed to determine the scientific productivity of EBM research over decades. Methods NCBI PubMed database was used to search, retrieve and classify publications according to research method and year of publication. Joinpoint regression analysis was undertaken to analyze trends in research productivity and the prevalence of individual research methods. Findings Analysis indicates that MA and SRV, which are classified as the highest ranking of evidence in the EBM, accounted for a relatively small but auspicious number of publications. For most research methods, the annual percent change (APC) indicates a consistent increase in publication frequency. MA, SRV and RCT show the highest rate of publication growth in the past twenty years. Only controlled clinical trials (CCT) shows a non-significant reduction in publications over the past ten years. Conclusions Higher quality research methods, such as MA, SRV and RCT, are showing continuous publication growth, which suggests an acknowledgement of the value of these methods. This study provides the first quantitative assessment of research method publication trends in EBM

Assessing the Impact of Poland\u27s 500+ Program on Childbirth Rates and Access to Pre-Primary Education

500+ is a benefit of 500PLN awarded monthly to all Polish families with at least two children. The government implemented it in 2016 to provide an incentive to Polish families to have more kids. My research will utilize econometric analysis to assess the impact of Poland\u27s 500+ program on childbirth rates and women\u27s employment. The existing literature presents evidence of the program\u27s effect on reinforcing traditional family models. Namely, women choose to be stay-at-home moms, leaving men to be the sole income earners in the household. I want to assess if that impact is different locally. I will focus on the program\u27s effect in 16 Polish voivodships (the Polish equivalent of states). That will allow me to check whether the effect is different for more rural or urban areas. I expect to see a slightly positive impact on childbirth rates. However, I do not think it will be as significant as the government had initially predicted. I will also verify if the trend for women not to work continues, especially in the last couple of years when more online jobs are available. I also expect the program to have a more significant effect on more rural areas that are less affluent than cities

Delta, Vietnam

Dit onderzoek is uitgevoerd binnen de C.T. de Wit onderzoekschoo

Nguyen van Tuong

Acknowledgements Funding for the study described in this report was provided by the Buffett Foundation and Family Health International. The views expressed in this report are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Buffett Foundation or of Family Health International. The authors wish to thank the following people for their assistance with this study and the production of this report

A convergent relaxation of the Douglas–Rachford algorithm

This paper proposes an algorithm for solving structured optimization problems, which covers both the backward–backward and the Douglas–Rachford algorithms as special cases, and analyzes its convergence. The set of fixed points of the corresponding operator is characterized in several cases. Convergence criteria of the algorithm in terms of general fixed point iterations are established. When applied to nonconvex feasibility including potentially inconsistent problems, we prove local linear convergence results under mild assumptions on regularity of individual sets and of the collection of sets. In this special case, we refine known linear convergence criteria for the Douglas–Rachford (DR) algorithm. As a consequence, for feasibility problem with one of the sets being affine, we establish criteria for linear and sublinear convergence of convex combinations of the alternating projection and the DR methods. These results seem to be new. We also demonstrate the seemingly improved numerical performance of this algorithm compared to the RAAR algorithm for both consistent and inconsistent sparse feasibility problems.Team Raf Van de Pla