In this chapter we revisit the relationship between income and fertility. There is overwhelming empirical evidence that fertility is negatively related to income in most countries at most times. Several theories have been proposed in the literature to explain this somewhat puzzling fact. The...

Infolge der Expansion der Bereiche Gesundheit, Bildung und Soziales in den Sozialstaaten während der letzten Dekaden ist die Erwerbsbeteiligung von Frauen gestiegen. Ist damit - so fragt Meyer in diesem Buch - auch die soziale Ungleichheit von Frauen und Männern reduziert worden? Im Vergleich...

Background Despite the attention paid to family support services in legislation and guidance, there is still relatively little evidence on which to base the development of effective services, and even less on the costs and cost-effectiveness of different models of support.Methods The study...

This paper takes both a practical and critical view of economic analysis in relation to the third sector. It argues that there is no one kind of economic analysis but that a certain form of such thinking, and associated techniques, has become dominant in thinking and practice. That mainstream...

The global financial crisis was triggered by the bursting of the United States housing bubble in 2007 and the reverberations of this are now being felt throughout the world. The crisis was greatly exacerbated by the behaviour of banks, which has inevitably made the position of any country that...

We study three topics on corruption that are of particular relevance to sub-Saharan Africa. Firstly, we address the question of why corruption is such an endemic problem in sub-Saharan Africa. Is it policy driven or "destiny"? We analyse indices of perceived corruption and test several theories...

The paper examines the influence of the real price of beer on violence-related injuries across the economic regions in England and Wales. The data are monthly frequency of violent-injury collected from a stratified sample of 58 National Health Service Emergency Departments 1995-2000. An...

This paper investigates the determinants of the prices of branded prescription medicines across different regulatory settings and health care systems, taking into account their launch date, patent status, market dynamics and the regulatory context in which they diffuse. By using volume-weighted...

The size of national health care expenditure is an important research and policy issue. This paper reviews theoretical and empirical analyses of an implied optimal size for a health sector. Various economic theories are explicitly or implicitly invoked, but none is fully satisfactory. Theory...

The objective of this study was to evaluate economically a screening programme within the Oxford Regional Health Authority for Down's syndrome, based on maternal serum {alpha} fetoprotein, unconjugated oestriol and human chorionic gonadotrophin as well as maternal age (the triple test) against...