The Prices in the Crises Das, Jishnu; Do, Quy-Toan
The Journal of economic perspectives,
04/2023, Volume:
37, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Governments in many low- and middle-income countries are developing health insurance products as a complement to tax-funded, subsidized provision of healthcare through publicly-operated facilities. ...We discuss two rationales for this transition. First, health insurance would boost fiscal revenues for healthcare, as post-treatment out-of-pocket payments to providers would be replaced by pre-treatment insurance premia to health ministries. Second, increased patient choice and carefully designed physician reimbursements would increase quality in the healthcare sector. Our essay shows that, at best, these objectives have only been partially met. Despite evidence that health insurance has provided financial protection, consumers are not willing to pay for unsubsidized premia. Health outcomes have not improved despite an increase in utilization. We argue that this is not because there was no room to improve the quality of care but because behavioral responses among healthcare providers have systematically undermined the objectives of these insurance schemes.
Abstract
This article examines the relationship between ethnic-based gender norms and conflict-related sexual violence. We generate a novel dyadic data set that contains information on the ethnic ...identity of all the actors involved in ethnic civil conflicts around the world between 1989 and 2019 and their use of sexual violence. We exploit ethnographic information to construct a new male dominance index at the ethnicity level that captures deep-rooted gender norms. First, we find that male-dominant armed actors are more likely to be perpetrators of sexual violence. Second, we consider the cultural distance in gender norms between the combatants and show that sexual violence is driven by a specific clash of conceptions on the appropriate role of men and women in society: sexual violence increases when the perpetrator is more male dominant than the victim. Additional analyses suggest that gender norms influence both the strategic use of sexual violence for military purposes and the expressive use of sexual violence for private motivations. These patterns are specific to sexual violence and do not explain general violence in a conflict. Differences in other cultural dimensions unrelated to gender are not associated with conflict-related sexual violence.
Abstract
Defined benefit (DB) pensions and Social Security are important resources for financing retirement in the USA. However, these illiquid, nonmarket forms of wealth are typically excluded from ...measures of net worth. To the extent that these broadly held resources substitute for savings, measures of wealth inequality that do not account for DB pensions and Social Security may be overstated. This article develops an alternative, expanded wealth concept, augmenting net worth data from the Survey of Consumer Finances with estimates of DB pension and expected Social Security wealth. We explore the concentration of wealth among households ages 40–59 and find that (i) including DB pension and Social Security results in markedly lower measures of wealth concentration and (ii) trends toward higher wealth inequality over time, while moderated, are still present. Simulation exercises show that reductions in Social Security benefits significantly increase wealth concentration for the youngest birth-year cohorts.
This book scrutinizes historical controversies regarding the past and the future of Japan in the age of Emperor Akihito. In Section I, each chapter discusses a different aspect of the historical ...controversy. The text then moves on to present a collection of the public discourse of Emperor Akihito, which offers a valuable source for analysis. This investigation of the constitutionally prescribed role of the Emperor as a national symbol will serve to help the reader understand contemporary Japanese society.
The paper examines the changes that education in Serbia - especially high education - has undergone during the transition period, 1989-2019. Based on the performed analysis, the author proposes to ...periodize changes in education and educational policy in transition Serbia. During this three-decade-long transition period, there is a clear distinction between pre-Bologna and Bologna phases in higher education. It is pointed out that the ideological basis of transitional education reform in Serbia, and especially its "Bologna phase", is NEO-liberal, globalist and anti-Enlightenment. The purpose of education has changed, so that educational institutions have become "enterprises", which, instead of having a role of spreading enlightenment and shaping personalities with broad education, have the function of making a profit on education and, at the same time, educating young people for occupations that should contribute to GDP growth as the main criterion for the merchantability of workforce qualifications. It is clear that the results of the whole process were: the inflation of the highly educated, emigration of the best experts, the retainment of mediocre and weak experts, the lack of workers of all kinds, the promotion of technical "knowledge", various forms of "systemic educational corruption" and neglect of the social sciences and humanities. This, of course, should also be observed through the prism of "global division of labor": peripheral or semi-peripheral countries "export" their best experts to the center countries, like they do with other raw materials, thus financing the prosperity of the rich, while at the same time remaining in stagnant or even regressive position.
We use the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) to advance U.S. wealth analysis along several dimensions. We develop a comprehensive framework that modifies the SCF to recover the wealth distribution ...over families, tax units, and individuals from 1989 to 2019. We show that, by ignoring unequal holdings within families, existing estimates considerably understate U.S. inequality across individuals. We find wealth concentration rose through the recent economic recovery, which differs from leading models that capitalize income into wealth even after aligning conceptual differences. We illustrate that private businesses are a growing impediment to accurately modeling wealth from income.
To what extent is Japan in decline? Recent views are that the rise of Japan is long since over and that the world's second largest economy is not just treading water but that society and the economy ...are failing, with potential catastrophic outcomes. But is this really the case? Could it be that once again Japan is being misread and misinterpreted?.
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