The effect of face masks on Covid-19 transmission is crucial for the health of populations. The effectiveness of face masks in reducing the transmission of Covid-19 varies across primary evidence. To perform a quantitative meta-analysis, we collected 258 estimates from 44 primary studies...

Die Gesundheitssysteme stehen weltweit zur Diskussion. Kann internationales Benchmarking ganzer Gesundheitssysteme dazu beitragen, Lösungen für deren Probleme zu finden? Diese Arbeit stellt drei aktuelle Ansätze solcher Vergleiche vor. Hierbei werden die Erkenntnisse ebenso erläutert wie die...

Steigende Kosten in den meisten Gesundheitssystemen und die damit verbundenen Finanzierungsprobleme stehen im Focus von vielen empirischen Untersuchungen. Wissenschaftler sind der Meinung, dass falsch gesetzte Anreize einer der Hauptgründe hierfür darstellen. Die vorliegende Arbeit umreißt...

In a sign of their increasing frustration with global efforts to ensure that all people everywhere will have access to COVID-19 vaccines, several developing countries have asked other members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) to join them in a sweeping waiver of the intellectual property...

The extent of premature death and ill health in the developing world is staggering. Death and ill health on such a scale are matters of concern in their own right. They also foster a brake on economic development. It was these twin concerns that led the international community to put health...

Critics of the U.S. health care system frequently point to other countries as models for reform. They point out that many countries spend far less on health care than the United States yet seem to enjoy better health outcomes. The United States should follow the lead of those countries, the...

Healthcare systems differ greatly across the world, however, it appears that the extent of public insurance (publicly/government funded healthcare) is the only institutional characteristic that plays a significant role in accounting for the large disparities in total healthcare spending. Other...

This paper examines access to new and innovative pharmaceuticals in a post-TRIPS era. The WTO’s TRIPS Agreement (TRIPS) makes it obligatory for WTO members – except least-developed country members (LDCs) - to provide pharmaceutical product patents with a 20-year protection term. Developing...

As we move past COVID19, telephone medicine and telemedicine is becoming integral to patient’s clinical care for both primary and specialty care. In this paper, after a brief bibliometric visualization of telemedicine literature in trade journals, we discuss the difference between...

The ability of Google Trends data to forecast the number of new daily cases and deaths of COVID-19 is examined using a dataset of 158 countries. The analysis includes the computations of lag correlations between confirmed cases and Google data, Granger causality tests, and an out-of-sample...