Review of The Last Hunger Season

No Abstract

Women in the AIDS Epidemic: A Portrait of Unmet Needs

While rarely a month goes by that the topic of AIDS escapes discussion in the legal literature, a survey of legal publications reveals that the implications of AIDS for women has received scant treatment by legal commentators. Unfortunately, this neglect is not unique to the legal community, but reflects a larger societal disinterest in women with AIDS. In fact, this epidemic looks quite different from the perspective of women. The medical, social, and legal needs of women affected by AIDS are in many ways needs that preexisted AIDS, but which have been magnified by the threat and implications of HIV infection. Rather than creating new problems, AIDS and attendant governmental indifference have cruelly widened the cracks in a system that has never met the needs of persons who have been historically disenfranchised because of gender, race, and class. In fashioning a legal, medical, and social response to the needs of women affected by HIV, one must be sensitive to the significant problems that poor women and women of color experienced prior to HIV infection gaining a foothold in various communities, as well as to the myriad social systems that traditionallly let them down. Too often, those developing AIDS policy frame the problem in terms that ineluctably miss the needs of large numbers of persons whose lives are threatened by HIV. Unlike many middle class gay men, women do not come into the system by knocking on an AIDS door. The way to reach women at risk is, for example, through pre-natal care, drug treatment, or Aid for Dependent Children (AFDC). For this reason, AIDS issues must be incorporated into systemic solutions to the needs of poor women in this country. For AIDS advocates to truly represent all persons affected by AIDS, they must recognize that many of the needs of women with AIDS are far more complex than those currently addressed by many AIDS organizations

Does Collective Responsibility for Performance Alter Party Strategies? Policy-Seeking Parties in Proportional Systems

AbstractAdams and Merrill have developed a model of policy-seeking parties in a parliamentary democracy competing in a PR electoral system, in which party elites are uncertain about voters’ evaluations of the parties’ valence attributes such as competence, integrity and charisma. This article extends that model to situations where voters hold coalitions of parties collectively responsible for their valence-related performances, such as how voters evaluate governing parties’ competence in handling issues like the economy, crime and foreign policy crises. It may also be relevant to voters’ evaluations of proto-coalitions of opposition parties. Computations suggest the central substantive conclusions reported in Adams and Merrill extend to this generalized model, and that collective responsibility enhances coalition members’ incentives to converge to similar policy positions but depresses their prospects of achieving their policy objectives.</jats:p

Public health insurance and entry into self-employment

We estimate the impact of a differential treatment of paid employees versus self-employed workers in a public health insurance system on the entry rate into entrepreneurship. In Germany, the public health insurance system is mandatory for most paid employees, but not for the selfemployed, who usually buy private health insurance. Private health insurance contributions are relatively low for the young and healthy, and until 2013 also for males, but less attractive at the other ends of these dimensions and if membership in the public health insurance allows other family members to be covered by contribution-free family insurance. Therefore, the health insurance system can create incentives or disincentives to starting up a business depending on the family’s situation and health. We estimate a discrete time hazard rate model of entrepreneurial entry based on representative household panel data for Germany, which include personal health information, and we account for non- random sample selection. We estimate that an increase in the health insurance cost differential between self-employed workers and paid employees by 100 euro per month decreases the annual probability of entry into selfemployment by 0.38 percentage points, i.e. about a third of the average annual entry rate. The results show that the phenomenon of entrepreneurship lock, which an emerging literature describes for the system of employer provided health insurance in the USA, can also occur in a public health insurance system. Therefore, entrepreneurial activity should be taken into account when discussing potential health care reforms, not only in the USA and in Germany