Does fiscal decentralization improve health outcomes? - evidence from a cross-country analysis

Decentralization of fiscal responsibilities has emerged as a primary objective on the agendas of national governments, and international organizations alike. Yet there is little empirical evidence on the potential benefits of this intervention. The authors fill in some quantitative evidence. Using panel data on infant mortality rates, GDP per capita, and the share of public expenditures managed by local governments, they find greater fiscal decentralization is consistently associated with lower mortality rates. The results suggest that the benefits of fiscal decentralization are particularly important for poor countries. They suggest also that the positive effects of fiscal decentralization on infant mortality, are greater in institutional environments that promote political rights. Fiscal decentralization also appears to be a mechanism for improving health outcomes in environments with a high level of ethno-linguistic fractionalization, however, the benefits from fiscal decentralization tend to be smaller.National Governance,Health Economics&Finance,Banks&Banking Reform,Economic Theory&Research,Municipal Financial Management

Health manpower employment and productivity in the Philippines

The study analyzes two of the major issues which emerged in health manpower planning and development exercises in the Philippines, namely, employment and productivity of specific categories of health manpower in the country's health delivery system. The first issue involves the critical questions of supply of, and needs or requirements for, specific health manpower in the country's health care delivery system. The second issue, meanwhile, emerged because of lack of certain types of health personnel as well as the rapid increase in the cost of medical care. These two issues evolved from the nagging concern over the maldistribution of health personnel and the existence of imbalances between what and how many of specific types of health manpower are needed and available in the country. The study covers only fourtypes of health professionals: physicians, nurses, midwives and dentists. This study is organized as follows. The next section discusses the supply of health manpower in the country. This includes a discussion of the estimates of actual supply as of 1987, their employment characteristics in terms of employment settings and their regional distribution. An attempt to forecast the supply of health manpower up to the year 2000 is made. The study also examines the factors which influence the location decisions of these health workers. Additional issues on supply such as production, utilization and migration are also discussed. The third section focuses on the needs of health manpower with a discussion on how to estimate or project the needs or requirements of health manpower. The fourth section discusses estimation of the needs of health manpower using the different methodologies. These estimates are then compared with supply to identify shortages or surpluses. Adiscussion of demand for health manpower is presented in Section 5. Although no actual estimation of demand equations are made due to insufficient data, several conceptual and methodological issues are discussed. Section 6 presents various productivity issues. Finally, section 7 concludes the study with some policy recommendations

Image zooming based on sampling theorems

In this paper we introduce two digital zoom methods based on sampling theory and we study their mathematical foundation. The first one (usually known by the names of "sinc interpolation", "zero-padding" and "Fourier zoom") is commonly used by the image processing community

Avances recientes en hormigón estructural reforzado con fibras, con especial atención a macro fibras sintéticas de poliolefina

Fibre-reinforced concrete (FRC) allows reduction in, or substitution of, steel-bars to reinforce concrete and led to the commonly named structural FRC, with steel fibres being the most widespread. Macro-polymer fibres are an alternative to steel fibres, being the main benefits: chemical stability and lower weight for analogous residual strengths of polyolefin-fibre-reinforced concrete (PFRC). Furthermore, polyolefin fibres offer additional advantages such as safe-handling, low pump-wear, light weight in transport and storage, and an absence of corrosion. Other studies have also revealed environmental benefits. After 30 years of research and practice, there remains a need to review the opportunities that such a type of fibre may provide for structural FRC. This study seeks to show the advances and future challenges of use of these polyolefin fibres and summarise the main properties obtained in both fresh and hardened states of PFRC, focussing on the residual strengths obtained from flexural tensile tests.El hormigón reforzado con fibras (HRF) permite la reducción parcial o total de barras de acero en el hormigón armado, acuñándose término HRF estructural, siendo las fibras de acero las más usadas. Las macro-fibras poliméricas son una alternativa a las de acero, aportando estabilidad química y menor peso para resistencias residuales iguales. Además, las fibras de poliolefina ofrecen beneficios adicionales tales como mayor seguridad de trabajo, menor desgaste de equipos de bombeo, menor peso en el transporte y almacenamiento, y ausencia de corrosión. Otros estudios también han revelado beneficios medio-ambientales. Después de 30 años de investigación y práctica, sigue siendo necesario analizar las oportunidades que estas fibras de poliolefina pueden proporcionar al HRF estructural. Este estudio muestra los avances y posibilidades del uso de estas fibras y resume las principales propiedades obtenidas tanto en estado fresco como endurecido, centrándose en la resistencia residual obtenida en los ensayos de tracción por flexión

Wide-Field Multi-Parameter FLIM: Long-Term Minimal Invasive Observation of Proteins in Living Cells.

Time-domain Fluorescence Lifetime Imaging Microscopy (FLIM) is a remarkable tool to monitor the dynamics of fluorophore-tagged protein domains inside living cells. We propose a Wide-Field Multi-Parameter FLIM method (WFMP-FLIM) aimed to monitor continuously living cells under minimum light intensity at a given illumination energy dose. A powerful data analysis technique applied to the WFMP-FLIM data sets allows to optimize the estimation accuracy of physical parameters at very low fluorescence signal levels approaching the lower bound theoretical limit. We demonstrate the efficiency of WFMP-FLIM by presenting two independent and relevant long-term experiments in cell biology: 1) FRET analysis of simultaneously recorded donor and acceptor fluorescence in living HeLa cells and 2) tracking of mitochondrial transport combined with fluorescence lifetime analysis in neuronal processes

Acneiform lesions secondary to ZD1839, an inhibitor of the epidermal growth factor receptor

Drugs that inhibit the epidermal growth factor receptor, such as ZD1839 or C225, are being used increasingly in the treatment of solid tumours. This has led to the appearance of new secondary effects. We describe the case of a patient who presented with an acneiform eruption secondary to the administration of ZD1839. These lesions healed in a few days after stopping the dru

Exploring the independent association of employment status to cancer survivors’ health-related quality of life

Background: Having a job has been associated with better Health-Related Quality of Life (HRQOL) in cancer survivors. However, the sociodemographic and disease-related profiles characterizing the survivors being employed and those having better HRQOL largely overlap. The present study aims to discern the degree to which employment status is independently associated with cancer survivors' HRQOL or if it mainly reflects the impact of other sociodemographic and cancer-related variables. Methods: Cross-sectional study on a heterogeneous sample of 772 working-age survivors of adult-onset cancer. An instrument specifically designed to assess HRQOL in cancer survivors and Multivariate Variance Analysis (MANOVA) were used. Results: Survival phase, cancer type, and employment status showed the main effects on cancer survivors' HRQOL. In particular, being employed (vs unemployed) had the greatest positive association with HRQOL, affecting ten of the twelve HRQOL domains considered. Also, interaction effects highlighted the role of age (younger) and marital status (single) as risk factors for a greater negative impact of variables affecting the survivor's HRQOL. Conclusions: The application of a multivariate methodology sheds new light on two relevant issues for the cancer survivor's HRQOL: (i) the existence of differences between diagnostic groups that are not attributed to other variables such as sex, and (ii) the important and independent role that employment status plays. Comprehensive cancer survivorship care should focus more on high-risk groups and include having a job as an essential aspect to consider and prompt. The fact that the employment status is susceptible to change represents a valuable opportunity to care for the wellbeing of this population

Horizontally transmitted symbiont populations in deep-sea mussels are genetically isolated

Eukaryotes are habitats for bacterial organisms where the host colonization and dispersal among individual hosts have consequences for the bacterial ecology and evolution. Vertical symbiont transmission leads to geographic isolation of the microbial population and consequently to genetic isolation of microbiotas from individual hosts. In contrast, the extent of geographic and genetic isolation of horizontally transmitted microbiota is poorly characterized. Here we show that chemosynthetic symbionts of individual Bathymodiolus brooksi mussels constitute genetically isolated subpopulations. The reconstruction of core genome-wide strains from high-resolution metagenomes revealed distinct phylogenetic clades. Nucleotide diversity and strain composition vary along the mussel life span and individual hosts show a high degree of genetic isolation. Our results suggest that the uptake of environmental bacteria is a restricted process in B. brooksi, where self-infection of the gill tissue results in serial founder effects during symbiont evolution. We conclude that bacterial colonization dynamics over the host life cycle is thus an important determinant of population structure and genome evolution of horizontally transmitted symbionts

Real-Time Robot Vision on Low-Performance Computing Hardware

Small robots have numerous interesting applications in domains like industry, education, scientific research, and services. For most applications vision is important, however, the limitations of the computing hardware make this a challenging task. In this paper, we address the problem of real-time object recognition and propose the Fast Regions of Interest Search (FROIS) algorithm to quickly find the ROIs of the objects in small robots with low-performance hardware. Subsequently, we use two methods to analyze the ROIs. First, we develop a Convolutional Neural Network on a desktop and deploy it onto the low-performance hardware for object recognition. Second, we adopt the Histogram of Oriented Gradients descriptor and linear Support Vector Machines classifier and optimize the HOG component for faster speed. The experimental results show that the methods work well on our small robots with Raspberry Pi 3 embedded 1.2 GHz ARM CPUs to recognize the objects. Furthermore, we obtain valuable insights about the trade-offs between speed and accuracy