Economic Renewal and Demographic Change Evaluation of policies for well functioning local labour markets in the Nordic countries

Regional imbalances caused by and effecting demographic change are unevenly spread between the Nordic countries. A common threat is that of labour shortage, which is already experienced in certain sectors in particular regions and forecasted on a broader scale in the future. The also common characteristic of an ageing labour force has important side effects from a social and economic perspective in some of the countries and regions, e g increasing rates of sickness leave. The sustainability in economic and social terms of several labour markets is challenged as population decline continues. The institutional preconditions for addressing these and other problems related to economic renewal and demographic change are basically quite similar in all Nordic countries, yet differ in a number of important details. The purpose of this paper is to analyse and evaluate how the different portfolios of policy instruments in Denmark, Sweden, Iceland, Norway and Finland are reflected in differing performance of local labour markets with similar economic and demographic structure and size. A leading hypothesis is that policies reducing risks for the individual when moving between different labour market statuses promotes the flexibility of labour markets. The empirical analysis is based on the transitional characteristics of the local labour market. Each transition or career - such as those from school to job and vice versa, from parental or sick leave to job, from unemployment to job, etc - can be temporary and repetitious. There are a number of theories explaining this increasingly transitional labour force behaviour stressing the individual choice of life-style, and life chances or careers perceived in different places. There are also theories stressing the importance of social capital. Supply side oriented labour market policy is adapting to the differing ”tastes” of individuals and life-style groups. Transition itself is also enforced by policy intervention to encourage temporary leave for life-long learning periods and parental leave. This transition can thus be viewed as a supplementary dimension to that usually described as labour mobility, i.e. qualification or de-qualification careers, inter-industry mobility and inter-regional or international migration

Carbon budget estimation of a subarctic catchment using adynamic ecosystem model at high spatial resolution

A large amount of organic carbon is stored in highlatitude soils. A substantial proportion of this carbon stock is vulnerable and may decompose rapidly due to temperature increases that are already greater than the global average. It is therefore crucial to quantify and understand carbon exchange between the atmosphere and subarctic/arctic ecosystems. In this paper, we combine an Arctic-enabled version of the process-based dynamic ecosystem model, LPJGUESS (version LPJG-WHyMe-TFM) with comprehensive observations of terrestrial and aquatic carbon fluxes to simulate long-term carbon exchange in a subarctic catchment at 50m resolution. Integrating the observed carbon fluxes from aquatic systems with the modeled terrestrial carbon fluxes across the whole catchment, we estimate that the area is a carbon sink at present and will become an even stronger carbon sink by 2080, which is mainly a result of a projected densification of birch forest and its encroachment into tundra heath. However, the magnitudes of the modeled sinks are very dependent on future atmospheric CO2 concentrations. Furthermore, comparisons of global warming potentials between two simulations with and without CO2 increase since 1960 reveal that the increased methane emission from the peatland could double the warming effects of the whole catchment by 2080 in the absence of CO2 fertilization of the vegetation. This is the first process-based model study of the temporal evolution of a catchment-level carbon budget at high spatial resolution, including both terrestrial and aquatic carbon. Though this study also highlights some limitations in modeling subarctic ecosystem responses to climate change, such as aquatic system flux dynamics, nutrient limitation, herbivory and other disturbances, and peatland expansion, our study provides one process-based approach to resolve the complexity of carbon cycling in subarctic ecosystems while simultaneously pointing out the key model developments for capturing complex subarctic processes

Multifactorial intervention to prevent cardiovascular disease in patients with early rheumatoid arthritis:protocol for a multicentre randomised controlled trial

INTRODUCTION: Cardiovascular morbidity is a major burden in patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA). In this study, we compare the effect of a targeted, intensified, multifactorial intervention with that of conventional treatment of modifiable risk factors for cardiovascular disease (CVD) in patients with early RA fulfilling the 2010 American College of Rheumatology European League Against Rheumatism (ACR/EULAR) criteria. METHODS AND ANALYSIS: The study is a prospective, randomised, open label trial with blinded end point assessment and balanced randomisation (1:1) conducted in 10 outpatient clinics in Denmark. The primary end point after 5 years of follow-up is a composite of death from cardiovascular causes, non-fatal myocardial infarction, non-fatal stroke and cardiac revascularisation. Secondary outcomes are: the proportion of patients achieving low-density lipoprotein cholesterol <2.5 mmol/L, glycated haemoglobin <48 mmol/mol, blood pressure <140/90 mm  Hg for patients without diabetes and <130/80 mm Hg for patients with diabetes and normoalbuminuria (urinary albumin creatinine ratio <30 mg/g) after 1 year of follow-up and the proportion of patients in each treatment group achieving low RA disease activity after 1 year, defined as a disease activity score C-reactive protein (DAS28-CRP) <3.2 and a DAS28-CRP score <2.6 after 12, 24 and 60 months. Furthermore, all hospitalisations for acute and elective reasons will be adjudicated by the event committee after 12, 24 and 60 months. Three hundred treatment-naive patients with early RA will be randomly assigned (1:1) to receive either conventional treatment administered and monitored by their general practitioner according to national guidelines (control group) or a stepwise implementation administered and monitored in a quarterly rheumatological nurse-administered set-up of behaviour modification and pharmacological therapy targeting (1) hyperlipidaemia, (2) hypertension, (3) hyperglycaemia and (4) microalbuminuria (intervention group). ETHICS AND DISSEMINATION: This protocol is approved by the local ethics committee (DK-S-2014007) and The Danish Health and Medicines Authority. Dissemination will occur through presentations at National and International conferences and publications in international peer-reviewed journals. TRIAL REGISTRATION NUMBER: NCT0224625

A Genome-Wide Association Study of Diabetic Kidney Disease in Subjects With Type 2 Diabetes

dentification of sequence variants robustly associated with predisposition to diabetic kidney disease (DKD) has the potential to provide insights into the pathophysiological mechanisms responsible. We conducted a genome-wide association study (GWAS) of DKD in type 2 diabetes (T2D) using eight complementary dichotomous and quantitative DKD phenotypes: the principal dichotomous analysis involved 5,717 T2D subjects, 3,345 with DKD. Promising association signals were evaluated in up to 26,827 subjects with T2D (12,710 with DKD). A combined T1D+T2D GWAS was performed using complementary data available for subjects with T1D, which, with replication samples, involved up to 40,340 subjects with diabetes (18,582 with DKD). Analysis of specific DKD phenotypes identified a novel signal near GABRR1 (rs9942471, P = 4.5 x 10(-8)) associated with microalbuminuria in European T2D case subjects. However, no replication of this signal was observed in Asian subjects with T2D or in the equivalent T1D analysis. There was only limited support, in this substantially enlarged analysis, for association at previously reported DKD signals, except for those at UMOD and PRKAG2, both associated with estimated glomerular filtration rate. We conclude that, despite challenges in addressing phenotypic heterogeneity, access to increased sample sizes will continue to provide more robust inference regarding risk variant discovery for DKD.Peer reviewe

A Farewell to Critical Junctures: Sorting Out Long-Run Causality of Income and Democracy

We consider the empirical relevance of two opposing hypotheses on the causality between income and democracy: The Democratic Transition claims that rising incomes cause a transition to democracy, whereas the Critical Junctures hypothesis denies this causal relation. Our empirical strategy is justified by Unified Growth Theory, which hypothesizes that the present international income differences have roots in the prehistoric past. Thus, we use prehistoric measures of biogeography as instruments for modern income levels, and find a large long-run causal effect of income on the degree of democracy. This result rejects the Critical Junctures hypothesis, which is an important part of the Primacy of Institutions view