Some recent empirical studies deny any direct effect of geography on development and conclude that institutions dominate all other potential determinants of development. An alternative view emphasizes that geographic factors such as disease ecology, as proxied by the prevalence of malaria, may...

Purpose The correlation between health care expenditure, gross domestic product (GDP) and population over 65 years (understood as share of the elderly) is a key question for health economics and demographic impact. The purpose of this paper is to study the role of ageing society to curb rising...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to offer a review of the trade policy in the UAE. It also investigates the dynamic interaction between trade openness and GDP per capita in this emerging economy. Design/methodology/approach The asymmetric generalized impulse response functions and the...

The literature on the economics of happiness in developed economies finds discrepancies between reported measures of well-being and income measures. One is the so-called Easterlin paradox: that average happiness levels do not increase as countries grow wealthier. This article explores how that...

Summary The rise of the East-German economy in the 1950s and 1960s and its decline in the 1970s and 1980s is difficult to explain by neoclassical economics. However; the observed life cycle may be explained by the inclusion of concepts from old and new institutional economics and from functional...

Abstract Is the Great Depression amenable to real business cycle theory? In the 1970s and 1980s Lucas and Prescott took an abstentionist stance. They maintained that, because of its exceptional character, an explanation of the Great Depression was beyond the grasp of the equilibrium approach to...

Purpose – As a result of the aging of American society, health care costs have been and will continue to rise, to the extent that they are not sustainable. Obviously, this trend will continue in spite of the 2010 health care reform. As a result of this uncontrollable problem, writers such as...

Abstract Two important unresolved issues in the evaluation of health care programs are the treatment of indirect costs and the selection of the appropriate discount rate. This paper emphasizes the role of distortionary taxation in addressing these issues. It establishes that: (i) indirect...