South Korea in 2015 YAP, O. FIONA
Asian survey,
01/2016, Volume:
56, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
The year 2015 featured real and metaphorical battles in South Korea: face-offs between the executive and the legislature saw President Park Geun-hye duel with the non-Park faction in the ruling ...Saenuri Party and fend off the opposition, whose alliance struggled with infighting and subsequent fractures. The government waged war against a health epidemic and exchanged artillery fire with North Korea at the Demilitarized Zone. The by-elections in April 2015 augur the political stage for pending elections in 2016 and 2017.
The Engaged Patient Timmermans, Stefan
Journal of health and social behavior,
09/2020, Volume:
61, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
The patient–doctor interaction has changed profoundly in the past decades. In reaction to paternalistic communication patterns, health policy makers have advocated for patient-centered care and ...shared decision-making. Although these models of medical communication remain still aspirational, patients have become more engaged in advocating for their own health in encounters with physicians. I argue that the engaged patient is a more accurate conceptualization of the changing role of the patient than patient consumerism, the empowered, or expert patient. I examine how the emergence of engaged patients influences the autonomy of health professionals, relates to the rise of the internet as an alternative source of medical information, centers the role of the patient–doctor interaction in public health epidemics, and contributes to health inequities.
This paper investigates whether political incentives affect the government's response during a health epidemic and the subsequent effects on citizens' voting behavior. Leveraging novel data, I study ...this question in the context of the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Liberia. The national incumbent government appropriately prioritized the allocation of resources to villages affected by the epidemic. By building a spatiotemporal epidemiological model that estimates the ex-ante optimal allocation of relief efforts, there is also evidence that resources were misallocated toward electoral swing villages. Instead, no resources were diverted toward core supporters or co-ethnic villages. Voters, in turn, reacted by rewarding the national incumbent party in areas where additional resources were misallocated.
•I investigate whether political incentives affect the government's response during a health epidemic.•The government prioritized villages hit by the epidemic, but misallocated relief efforts toward politically swing villages.•Voters' support for the national incumbent party increased in areas with higher resource misallocation.
This article aims at analysing the role of international tourism attractiveness as a potential factor for the outbreak and the early spread of the recent COVID-19 disease across the world (also ...called the first wave) with a special focus on small Island economies. Econometric testing is implemented over a cross-country sample including 205 countries/territories (with 59 small islands) after controlling for several usual suspects. The results state a positive and significant relationship between COVID-19 prevalence and inbound tourism arrivals per capita. Thus in the early stages of the spread (before travel restrictions), international tourism could be seen as one of the main responsible factors for the recent pandemic, validating the “tourism-led vulnerability hypothesis”. Accordingly, considering that such health shocks should be more frequent in the near future, this finding suggests that the tourism specialization model in the context of small islands is too vulnerable to be considered as sustainable in the medium and long-run. Policymakers must opt for economic diversification when possible. Otherwise, building up a strong public-health system alongside a specialized tourism sector is required.
Advance Market Commitments Kremer, Michael; Levin, Jonathan; Snyder, Christopher M.
AEA papers and proceedings,
05/2020, Volume:
110
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Ten years ago, donors committed $1.5 billion to a pilot Advance Market Commitment (AMC) to help purchase pneumococcal vaccine for low-income countries. The AMC aimed to encourage the development of ...such vaccines, ensure distribution to children in low-income countries, and pilot the AMC mechanism for possible future use. Three vaccines have been developed and more than 150 million children immunized, saving an estimated 700,000 lives. This paper reviews the economic logic behind AMCs, the experience with the pilot, and key issues for future AMCs.
The frequency and complexity of viral outbreaks is increasing over time. The economic costs of outbreaks are severe; this is not only because of increased morbidity and mortality but also because ...viral outbreaks—representing aggregate health shocks—can severely restrict social interaction and economic exchange. Such aggregate health shocks lead to behavioral and prevalence responses along many margins. We describe some important response channels, discuss emerging empirical results on these margins from a nascent literature, and stress important avenues for future work.
Community-Based Crisis Response Christensen, Darin; Dube, Oeindrila; Haushofer, Johannes ...
AEA papers and proceedings,
05/2020, Volume:
110
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Postmortems on the recent Ebola outbreak in West Africa suggest that effective community engagement helped slow transmission by encouraging people to come forward and be tested. We evaluate the ...impact of Community Care Centers: a new crisis response model designed to allay fears about western medical care and, thus, encourage early reporting, isolation, and treatment. We employ new panel data on reported Ebola cases and a difference-in-difference design and find that Community Care Centers dramatically increased reporting, potentially reducing the spread of Ebola. Our results highlight how community-based efforts to increase confidence in health systems can be critical for crisis management.
Sredinom 18. stoljeća na prostoru Hrvatsko-slavonske vojne krajine uspostavljeno je ukupno 11 krajiških pukovnija, vojnih, ali ujedno i teritorijalno-upravnih jedinica. Iako je glavna misao vodilja ...pri tom reformskom procesu koji su provodile središnje bečke vlasti bila u što većoj mjeri ujednačiti položaj krajišnika koji su nastanjivali taj golemi prostor koji se protezao uz granicu s Osmanskim Carstvom, pojedina krajiška područja su ipak u određenom pogledu zadržala svoju posebnost. U tome smislu Lička se pukovnija isticala kao jedino krajiško područje čije su se granice prostirale uz posjede čak dviju imperijalnih sila – Mletačke Republike i Osmanskog Carstva. Nadalje, radilo se o jednom od najslabije razvijenih krajiških područja u gospodarskom smislu, ponajviše zbog oskudice obradivog tla u tom brdovitom kraju. Međutim, karakteristično je također da je s toga teritorija potekao izuzetno kvalitetan vojni kadar koji je služio u habsburškoj vojsci. Vojna služba imala je i utjecaj na zdravlje ličkih krajišnika, što je i središnja tema ovoga rada. Na primjeru Ličke pukovnije razmotrit će se utjecaj zaraznih bolesti na živote krajišnika, kao i uloga ličkih krajišnika u sklopu habsburškog sanitarnog kordona tijekom 18. i 19. stoljeća.
In the middle of the eighteenth century, a reorganization of the Croatian-Slavonian Military Frontier took place, which resulted in the establishment of eleven Grenzer regiments, designed to function both as military and territorial units. Although the guiding thought behind the reform carried out by the central authorities in Vienna was to integrate as much as possible the diverse Grenzer areas stretching along the border between the Habsburg Monarchy and the Ottoman Empire, certain regimental territories remained specific due to their characteristic features. In this regard, the Lika Regiment stood out as the only area in the entire Military Frontier which faced the lands of two imperial powers – the Venetian Republic and the Ottoman Empire. Furthermore, this was one of the most economically underdeveloped Grenzer areas, because unfavorable climate and terrain contributed to the scarcity of arable land. However, this territory also constituted a valuable recruitment ground for the Habsburg armies. All these factors had a significant impact on the health of the inhabitants of the area, which is the main focus of this paper. On the example of the Lika Regiment, the paper will give an overview of the impact that infectious diseases had on the lives of local inhabitants, as well as of the role that the Lika Grenzer played within the Habsburg Sanitary Cordon during the eighteenth and nineteenth century.
This paper studies the spread of antibiotic resistance and its determinants, relying on unique data at state, year, bacteria, and drug level, covering all US states. I relate antibiotic resistance to ...the use of antibiotics in human prescription and animal production in a triple difference-in-difference design to control for confounders. Despite that animal production absorbs most of the antibiotic production, the results show that the main determinant of resistance is in fact human prescriptions, emphasizing the role of policies targeting hospitals and ambulatory care. Resistance is particularly sensitive to antibiotic use for newer drugs.
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