Current Issue : October - December Volume : 2011 Issue Number : 4 Articles : 7 Articles
Mortality data provide essential evidence on the health status of populations in crisis-affected and resource-poor settings and to guide and assess relief operations. Retrospective surveys are commonly used to collect mortality data in such populations, but require substantial resources and have important methodological limitations. We evaluated the feasibility of an alternative method for rapidly quantifying mortality (the informant method). The study objective was to assess the economic feasibility of the informant method.\nThe informant method captures deaths through an exhaustive search for all deaths occurring in a population over a defined and recent recall period, using key community informants and next-of-kin of decedents. Between July and October 2008, we implemented and evaluated the informant method in: Kabul, Afghanistan; Mae La camp for Karen refugees, Thai-Burma border; Chiradzulu District, Malawi; and Lugufu and Mtabila refugee camps, Tanzania. We documented the time and cost inputs for the informant method in each site, and compared these with projections for hypothetical retrospective mortality surveys implemented in the same site with a 6 month recall period and with a 30 day recall period.\nThe informant method was estimated to require an average of 29% less time inputs and 33% less monetary inputs across all four study sites when compared with retrospective surveys with a 6 month recall period, and 88% less time inputs and 86% less monetary inputs when compared with retrospective surveys with a 1 month recall period. Verbal autopsy questionnaires were feasible and efficient, constituting only 4% of total person-time for the informant method's implementation in Chiradzulu District.\nThe informant method requires fewer resources and incurs less respondent burden. The method's generally impressive feasibility and the near real-time mortality data it provides warrant further work to develop the method given the importance of mortality measurement in such settings....
This work provides a framework to analyze the role of financial development as a source of endogenous instability in emerging economies subject to moral hazard problems. We propose and study a dynamic model describing a small open economy with a tradeable good produced by internationally mobile capital and a country specific input, using Leontief technology. We demonstrate that emerging markets could be endogenously unstable since large capital inflows increase risk and exacerbate asymmetric information problems, according to empirical evidences. Using bifurcation and stability analysis, we describe the properties of the system attractors, we assess the plausibility for complex dynamics and, we find out that border collision bifurcations can emerge due to the fact that the state space is piecewise smooth. As a consequence, when a fixed or periodic point loses its stability, the final dynamics may become suddenly chaotic. This fact may explain how financial crises occurred in emerging economies....
Health monitoring of world economy is an important issue, especially in a time of profound economic difficulty world-wide. The most important aspect of health monitoring is to accurately predict economic downturns. To gain insights into how economic crises develop, we present two metrics, positive and negative income entropy and distribution analysis, to analyze the collective ââ?¬Ë?ââ?¬Ë?spatialââ?¬â?¢Ã¢â?¬â?¢ and temporal dynamics of companies in nine sectors of the world economy over a 19 year\nperiod from 1990ââ?¬â??2008. These metrics provide accurate predictive skill with a very low false-positive rate in predicting downturns. The new metrics also provide evidence of phase transition-like behavior prior to the onset of recessions. Such a transition occurs when negative pretax incomes prior to or during economic recessions transition from a thin-tailed exponential distribution to the higher entropy Pareto distribution, and develop even heavier tails than those of the positive pretax incomes. These features propagate from the crisis initiating sector of the economy to other sectors....
The global financial crisis resulted in a significant downturn in the global economy, with impacts felt throughout the world. In this paper, we use a dynamic global general equilibrium model to explore the longer-term impacts of the financial crisis, with a\nparticular focus on China. The economies of most countries suffered to some extent, with the extent of declines in the long run likely to depend on the extent to which investment declines. Our results suggest that overall the financial crisis leads to international trade falling by approximately 14 percent from the 2020 baseline level.Within this, the composition of trade changes, particularly reflecting changes in demand for construction of investment goods and increasing longer-term demand from economies like China.We also briefly consider the impact of a more protracted recovery from the crisis, which has even more significant impacts on the global economy....
We propose a new set of stylized facts quantifying the structure of financial markets. The key idea is to study the combined structure of both investment strategies and prices in order to open a qualitatively new level of understanding of financial and economic markets. We study the detailed order flow on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange of China for the whole year of 2003. This enormous dataset allows us to compare (i) a closed national market (A-shares) with an international market (B-shares), (ii) individuals and institutions and (iii) real traders to random strategies with respect to timing that share otherwise all other characteristics. We find in general that more trading results in smaller net return due to trading frictions, with the exception that the net return is independent of the trading frequency for A-share individual traders. We unveiled quantitative power laws with non-trivial exponents, that quantify the deterioration of performance with frequency and with holding period of the strategies used by traders. \nRandom strategies are found to perform much better than real ones, both for winners and losers. Surprising large arbitrage opportunities exist, especially when using zero-intelligence strategies. This is a diagnostic of possible inefficiencies of these financial markets....
Conventional wisdom identifies biodiversity hotspots as priorities for conservation investment because they capture dense concentrations of species. However, density of species does not necessarily imply conservation ââ?¬Ë?efficiencyââ?¬â?¢. Here we explicitly consider conservation efficiency in terms of species protected per dollar invested.\nWe apply a dynamic return on investment approach to a global biome and compare it with three alternate priority setting approaches and a random allocation of funding. After twenty years of acquiring habitat, the return on investment approach protects between 32% and 69% more species compared to the other priority setting approaches. To correct for potential inefficiencies of protecting the same species multiple times we account for the complementarity of species, protecting up to three times more distinct vertebrate species than alternate approaches.\nIncorporating costs in a return on investment framework expands priorities to include areas not traditionally highlighted as priorities based on conventional irreplaceability and vulnerability approaches....
There is concern among public health professionals that the current economic downturn, initiated by the financial crisis that started in 2007, could precipitate the transmission of infectious diseases while also limiting capacity for control. Although studies have reviewed the potential effects of economic downturns on overall health, to our knowledge such an analysis has yet to be done focusing on infectious diseases. We performed a systematic literature review of studies examining changes in infectious disease burden subsequent to periods of crisis. The review identified 230 studies of which 37 met our inclusion criteria. Of these, 30 found evidence of worse infectious disease outcomes during recession, often resulting from higher rates of infectious contact under poorer living circumstances, worsened access to therapy, or poorer retention in treatment. The remaining studies found either reductions in infectious disease or no significant effect. Using the paradigm of the ââ?¬Å?SIRââ?¬Â (susceptible-infected-recovered) model of infectious disease transmission, we examined the implications of these findings for infectious disease transmission and control. Key susceptible groups include infants and the elderly. We identified certain high-risk groups, including migrants, homeless persons, and prison populations, as particularly vulnerable conduits of epidemics during situations of economic duress. We also observed that the long-term impacts of crises on infectious disease are not inevitable: considerable evidence suggests that the magnitude of effect depends critically on budgetary responses by governments. Like other emergencies and natural disasters, preparedness for financial crises should include consideration of consequences for communicable disease control....
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