WHO's Fooling Who? The World Health Organization's Problematic Ranking of Health Care Systems

The World Health Report 2000, prepared by the World Health Organization, presented performance rankings of 191 nations' health care systems. These rankings have been widely cited in public debates about health care, particularly by those interested in reforming the U.S. health care system to resemble more closely those of other countries. Michael Moore, for instance, famously stated in his film SiCKO that the United States placed only 37th in the WHO report. CNN.com, in verifying Moore's claim, noted that France and Canada both placed in the top 10. Those who cite the WHO rankings typically present them as an objective measure of the relative performance of national health care systems. They are not. The WHO rankings depend crucially on a number of underlying assumptions -- some of them logically incoherent, some characterized by substantial uncertainty, and some rooted in ideological beliefs and values that not everyone shares. The analysts behind the WHO rankings express the hope that their framework "will lay the basis for a shift from ideological discourse on health policy to a more empirical one." Yet the WHO rankings themselves have a strong ideological component. They include factors that are arguably unrelated to actual health performance, some of which could even improve in response to worse health performance. Even setting those concerns aside, the rankings are still highly sensitive to both measurement error and assumptions about the relative importance of the components. And finally, the WHO rankings reflect implicit value judgments and lifestyle preferences that differ among individuals and across countries

Utilizing Convolutional Neural Networks for Global Seagrass Habitat Mapping

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are becoming an increasingly prevalent machine learning algorithm due to their high accuracy and lack of reliance on heuristic processes. One of the major drawbacks of convolutional neural networks is their reliance on large amounts of training data in order to generate sensible results. This talk will cover how our team has utilized the strengths and overcome the weaknesses of convolutional neural networks as they apply to seagrass habitat mapping. We will share our technical CNN results over time, detail the requirements and challenges that our team overcame and explore how other teams can better incorporate a stronger seagrass component into their machine learning projects

American Capitalism and Global Convergence: After the Bubble

Throughout the 1990s, the social-market capitalism that prevailed in most of the larger countries of continental Western Europe and the producer-oriented or mercantilist capitalism characteristic of Japan and a number of other large Asian economies were under strong pressures to migrate their economies toward U.S. (or Anglo-Saxon)-style investor capitalism. This paper explores whether the pressures for convergence exerted by globalization persisted into the first decade of the 21st century, after the American "bubble" burst and the United States fell from grace in a number of economic, social, and political dimensions. American-style investor capitalism indeed continues to be the dominant model where capital markets and corporate governance are concerned. Various pressures continue to push the labor markets of industrial nations in that direction as well, despite strong political and social backlash. Where relations with customers are concerned, however, it is the requirements imposed on products, services and production processes by the stringent regulations of the EU's social market capitalism, and its adherence to the precautionary principle, that dominate. At the same time, U.S.-style capitalism is itself evolving as its participants struggle to restore public trust and to integrate the adaptability and market-responsiveness of its institutions with a broadened focus on corporate responsibility to multiple stakeholders.

Global Monetarism and the Monetary Approach to the Balance of Payments

macroeconomics, global monetarism, monetary approach, balance of payments

Building a Stronger Eastern Partnership: Towards an EaP 2.0

The European Union has been working to deepen the economic and political relationship with its Eastern neighbouring countries over the recent years. A set of formal agreements are intended for signature between the EU and Ukraine, Moldova and the South Caucasus states at the Eastern Partnership (EaP) summit scheduled for 28-29 November 2013. These agreements have provoked a response from the Russian Federation which is seeking to offer an alternative set of economic relationship to the exclusion of the EU. In the first Policy Paper to be published, the recently created Global Europe Centre (GEC) sets out a reform agenda that the EU needs to adopt towards the EaP states to enable a more binding relationship. The paper argues that the EU needs to define a ‘next generation’ objective for the EaPas it enters the implementation phase of the current set of Association Agreements (AAs). The proposal is that the EU should set a European Partnership Community (EPC) statusas a bilateral and multilateral goal for the EaP. The paper contends that there is urgency for the EU to think more strategically vis-à-vis its neighbourhood, and create a more clear-cut place for Russia to avoid the current situation of divisive competition. Further, the EU needs to reform aspects of its current EaP policy. The EU needs to define a clearer, and measureable set of objectives for its role in the resolution of the ‘frozen’ conflicts of its Eastern neighbourhood; refresh its policy towards Belarus; speed up visa liberalisation to ease travel for citizens of the EU’s neighbouring states; and deepen and broaden civil society engagement by investing more in deep democracy, linkage and people-to-people contacts