Decomposing social indicators using distributional data

Are the poor less healthy? Does public health spending matter more to them? The authors decompose aggregate health indicators using a random coefficients model in which the aggregates are regressed on the population distribution by subgroups, taking account of the statistical properties of the error term and allowing for other determinants of health status, including public health spending. This also allows them to test possible determinants of the variation in the underlying subgroup indicators. They implement the approach with data on health outcomes and poverty measures for 35 developing countries. The authors find that poor people have appreciably worse health status on average than others - and that differences in public health spending tend to matter more to the poor. This is probably because the nonpoor are in a better position to buy private health care.Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Public Health Promotion,Health Systems Development&Reform,Health Economics&Finance,Early Child and Children's Health,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Health Economics&Finance,Inequality,Health Systems Development&Reform,Poverty Assessment

How robust is a poverty profile?

Comparisons of poverty - indicating where or when poverty is greatest, for example - typically matter far more to policy choices than aggregate poverty measures, such as how many people are deemed"poor."So the author's examine how measurement practices affect empirical poverty profiles. They discuss the pros and cons of alternative approaches to developing a poverty profile and use those approaches on the same data set. In Indonesia, as in many countries, past methods of building poverty profiles have used the food-energy-intake method, defining the poverty line as the normal consumption spending at which a person typically attains a predetermined food-energy-intake in each subgroup. The author's argue that his method can yield differences in poverty lines (between urban and rural areas, for example) that exceed the cost-of-living differences the poor face. So, that method can mislead policy choices aimed at reducing absolute poverty. For comparison, they explore a cost-of-basic-needs methods, whereby an explicit bundle of foods typically consumed by the poor is valued at local prices, with a minimal allowance for non-food goods consistent with spending by the poor. This approach, though not ideal, is a conceptually transparent operational alternative that can be implemented with available data. They argue that this approach is more likely to generate a consistent poverty profile in that two people with the same measured standard of living - purchasing power of basic consumption needs - will be treated the same way. This refinement of past approaches retains some seemingly desirable features (such as concern for the tastes of the poor) and avoids others (such as the implicit use of a higher real poverty line in richer regions of the same country). For Indonesia, the cost-of-basic-needs methods finds more incidence, depth, and severity of poverty in rural areas, whereas the food-energy-intake method finds all measures of poverty worse in urban areas. The ranking of regions (provinces divided into rural and urban) by two methods has virtually zero correlation. The poverty profile by principal sector of employment is less sensitive to the choice of method, particularly in urban areas. This case study supports the conclusion that policymakers should be wary of underlying differences between methods of estimating poverty measures. The cost-of-basic-needs approach is fairly robust to severaly other methodological choices, notably changes in the composition of the basic need bundle (which determines the overall level of the poverty line), differences in the functional form of the poverty measure, and adjustment for spatial differences in prices, issues that have dominated debates on how to measure poverty. Ironically, the results of this study suggest that these issues matter less to poverty rankings (and hence to policy conclusions) than do the choices made in mapping a given specification of basic needs into monetary poverty lines.Poverty Lines,Poverty Assessment,Environmental Economics&Policies,Achieving Shared Growth,Poverty Reduction Strategies

Evaluating Job Training in Two Chinese Cities

Recent years have seen a surge in the evidence on the impacts of active labor market programs for numerous countries. However, little evidence has been presented on the effectiveness of such programs in China. Recent economic reforms, associated massive lay-offs, and accompanying public retraining programs make China fertile ground for rigorous impact evaluations. This study evaluates retraining programs for laid-off workers in the cities of Shenyang and Wuhan using a comparison group design. To our knowledge, this is the first evaluation of its kind in China. The evidence suggests that retraining helped workers find jobs in Wuhan, but had little effect in Shenyang. However, in terms of earnings impacts, retraining appears to have increased earnings in Shenyang but not in Wuhan. The study raises questions about the overall effectiveness of retraining expenditures, and it offers some directions for policymakers about future interventions to help laid-off workers.Active labor market programs, job training, impact evaluation, propensity score matching, China

Investigation of nonlinear control system stability by phase space partition

One of the most important areas of nonlinear control system study is system stability. Unlike linear systems, it is quite complex and it has been defined in various ways in literature. The; only powerful general tool available for determining regions of asymptotic stability is Liapunov's direct method. But the finding of the Liapunov function is quite difficult in most cases and there are; few general rules available though,continuing research has broadened the class of functions for which it can be used. This research concentrates on an effort to establish whether the suggested criterions for phase space partition, discriminant, generalised Hurwitz and Ku Shen, can be made to yield areas of asymptotic stability for a class of functions which could be mathematically defined. It finds that though in general, they are quite useful in building Multilinear Models for non-linear systems, they are of little use in defining stability. A new separate use criterion is suggested, which does furnish the regions of stability but for a very restricted class of simple control systems.Electrical and Computer Engineering, Department o

Targeting the Poor in Rural Java

Summaries This article examines the regional and household characteristics of poverty in rural Java to assess the efficacy of targeted anti?poverty programmes. Analysis of household data shows important geographic and spatial features to rural poverty in Java. However, it also highlights the limitations of geographic targeting; 43 per cent of remaining poor in rural Java live in non?poor regions. The article suggests that an effective anti?poverty strategy for rural Java would focus on continued broad?based growth, judicious use of geographic targeting, and special efforts to enhance the poor's access to productive assets, regardless of where they live

Outcomes of Albumin Use in the Treatment of Acute Hepatorenal Disorders: A Single Center Experience

Intravenous albumin is recommended for hepatorenal disorders (HRD), but individuals who do not recover renal function may be at a high risk for pulmonary edema. We reviewed outcomes by the amount of albumin infused in 93 patients not receiving dialysis at admission but being treated with intravenous albumin for acute HRD at our institution. Absence of renal recovery was defined as no decrease in serum creatinine and requirement of dialysis during hospitalization, and partial renal recovery was defined as a decrease in serum creatinine but not to prehospitalization levels. Associations of clinical factors including total albumin infused, presence of renal recovery, and oliguria with the development of pulmonary edema during hospitalization were determined using logistic regression. Of the 93 patients, 20 patients had complete renal recovery, 17 patients had partial renal recovery, and 56 patients showed no renal recovery. Most patients received 300–600 g of albumin. Overall, 47.3% of patients developed pulmonary edema (n=44), but the risk was 75% in patients with oliguria on presentation and no renal recovery versus 17% in those with no oliguria and complete renal recovery (P<0.001). In the logistic regression model, oliguria (3.32; 95% confidence interval [CI]: 1.12, 9.81) and no renal recovery (3.38; 95% CI: 1.24, 9.16) were each associated with higher odds of pulmonary edema after adjustment for covariates. No association was noted between total albumin infused and pulmonary edema. In summary, absence of renal recovery and oliguria in patients with HRD receiving intravenous albumin is associated with a higher risk of pulmonary edema

All-optical silicon simplified passive modulation

In this paper we present an all-optical silicon based modulator suggested also for high power operation and for pulse picker application being used as part of fiber lasers system. The paper theoretically and experimentally investigates several new and important insights involving the dependence of the relative transmission on the pump pulse energy for different finesse values of the constructed cavity as well as the dependence of the response rate of the device to the pump wavelength due to coexistence of two physical recombination processes: fast surface effect and slow bulk recombination. To adapt the constructed silicon based cavity to be used in lasers applications, we aligned the pump and the signal beams to co-propagate through the device while the usage of a cavity allowed a low power pump to yield a significant extinction ratio at the output of the device

Myopericarditis in a Korean Young Male With Systemic Lupus Erythematosus

Myocardial involvement with clinical symptoms is a rare manifestation of systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), despite the relatively high prevalence of myocarditis at autopsies of SLE patients. In this review, we report the case of a 19-year-old male SLE patient who initially presented with myopericarditis and was successfully treated with high dose of glucocorticoids