scholarly journals Political Polarization and the Size of Government

2010 ◽  
Vol 104 (3) ◽  
pp. 543-565 ◽  
Author(s):  
ERIK LINDQVIST ◽  
ROBERT ÖSTLING

In this article, we study the relationship between political polarization and public spending using the dispersion of self-reported political preferences as our measure of polarization. Political polarization is strongly associated with smaller government in democratic countries, but there is no relationship between polarization and the size of government in undemocratic countries. The results are robust to a large set of control variables, including gross domestic product per capita and income inequality.

Circulation ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 129 (suppl_1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rajesh Vedanthan ◽  
Mondira Ray ◽  
Valentin Fuster ◽  
Ellen Magenheim

Introduction: Hypertension is the leading global risk for mortality and its prevalence is increasing in many low- and middle-income countries. Hypertension treatment rates are low worldwide, potentially in part due to insufficient human resources. However, the relationship between health worker density and hypertension treatment rates is unknown. Objective: To conduct an econometric analysis of the relationship between health worker density and hypertension treatment rates worldwide. Methods: Hypertension treatment rates were collected from published reports between 1980 and 2010. Data on health worker (physician and nurse) density were obtained from the World Health Organization (WHO). Data for potential confounding variables--per capita gross domestic product, hospital bed density, burden of infectious diseases, land area and urban population--were obtained from WHO and World Bank databases. Potential interaction by per capita gross domestic product was evaluated. Multivariable logistic-logarithmic regression analysis was performed using Stata. Results: Full data were available from 146 countries spanning all World Bank income classification categories. Health worker density was significantly associated with hypertension treatment rate in the unadjusted model (beta = 0.23; p < 0.005). In the fully adjusted model, the association remained positive but was not statistically significant (beta = 0.30; p = 0.078) (Figure). Hypertension treatment rates were more strongly related to physician than nurse density (beta = 0.21 vs 0.08; p = 0.10 vs 0.49). Conclusion: Hypertension treatment rates across the world appear to be related to health worker density, although the relationship does not achieve strict statistical significance. Our results suggest that a 10% increase in health worker density is associated with a 2-3% increase in hypertension treatment rate. Given the global burden of hypertension and other chronic diseases, WHO guidelines for health workforce staffing may need to be reconsidered.


2021 ◽  
pp. 139156142110390
Author(s):  
Fahmida Khatun ◽  
Syed Yusuf Saadat

Inequality in the distribution of income can be beneficial or detrimental for economic growth depending on the level of inequality. This study advocates that when income inequality is low, increase in income inequality increases economic growth, whereas when income inequality is high, increase in income inequality decreases economic growth. The level of inequality that maximizes economic growth is defined as the optimum level of income inequality. This article attempts to determine the optimum level of income inequality for South Asia through an econometric analysis. It uses panel data from Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, over a 34-year period to undertake a systematic investigation using panel instrumental variables techniques. The results of this study confirm that an optimum level of income inequality does exist, and occurs at a Gini coefficient value of 0.4492. Thus, this research empirically confirms that the relationship between income inequality and economic growth is non-linear. Further calculations show that for an economy that is at the optimum level of income inequality, the per capita gross domestic product can be expected to double within approximately 13 years, provided all other factors are held constant. However, a change in the Gini coefficient by 0.10 units in either direction—higher or lower—away from the optimum level, can increase the number of years for the per capita gross domestic product to double by 55 to 57 years, depending on the method of approximation. JEL: D31, D63, O15, O40


2018 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 237802311877362 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaorui Huang ◽  
Andrew K. Jorgenson

The authors examine the potentially asymmetrical relationship between economic development and consumption-based and production-based CO2 emissions. They decompose economic development into economic expansions and contractions, measured separately as increases and decreases in gross domestic product per capita, and examine their unique effects on emissions. Analyzing cross-national data from 1990 to 2014, the authors find no statistical evidence of asymmetry for the overall sample. However, for a sample restricted to nations with populations larger than 10 million, the authors observe a contraction-leaning asymmetry whereby the effects of economic contraction on both emissions outcomes are larger in magnitude than the effects of economic expansion. This difference in magnitude is more pronounced for consumption-based emissions than for production-based emissions. The authors provide tentative explanations for the variations in results across the different samples and emissions measures and underscore the need for more nuanced research and deeper theorization on potential asymmetry in the relationship between economic development and anthropogenic emissions.


2019 ◽  
Vol 42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Y. Olivola ◽  
Helen Susannah Moat ◽  
Tobias Preis

Abstract Recent studies have shown that population-level time perspectives can be approximated using “big data” on search engine queries, and that these indices, in turn, predict the per-capita Gross Domestic Product of countries. Although these findings seem to support Baumard's suggestion that affluence makes people more future-oriented, they also reveal a more complex relationship between time perspectives and economic outputs.


Author(s):  
Deepa Dongarwar ◽  
Brisa ◽  
Sitratullah ◽  
Korede ◽  
Hamisu

Coronavirus disease – 2019 (COVID-19) vaccination is a crucial part of a multi-faceted public health response, and possibly, the best hope for ending the pandemic. In this ecological study, we examined the relationship between Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita and early vaccination rates across the world. Spearman’s correlation analysis was utilized to assess the strength and direction of the relationship between countries’ COVID-19 vaccination rates and GDP per capita. We observed that countries with high vaccination rates had higher GDP per capita (Spearman’s ƍ=0.35, p-value=0.01). Our study provides valuable insight into the association of GDP per capita and the early distribution of the COVID-19 vaccination.   Copyright © 2021 Dongarwar et al. Published by Global Health and Education Projects, Inc. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License CC BY 4.0.


1992 ◽  
Vol 71 (3) ◽  
pp. 723-726
Author(s):  
Y. G. Pillay

The data set from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) was explored to investigate the relationship of gross domestic product (which provides an indication of the wealth of a country) and the provision of psychiatric services (specifically inpatient psychiatric services) in selected OECD countries. Gross domestic product per capita correlated .84 with expenditure per capita on psychiatric hospitals but r was zero between number of beds per 1000 population and length of stay.


2021 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 640-646
Author(s):  
Ali S. Shukr ◽  
Basim H. Hameed

The research aims to study the most important factors affecting carbon dioxide emissions Co2, through a model. Explanatory variables were used in the model, which are the average per capita gross domestic product (GDP), the square per capita gross domestic product (GDPSQ), per capita energy consumption (CONS), and the POP population for the period 2000-2017 via using  double logarithmic formula  which is more suitable for economic, statistical and econometric  logic in this type of studies, the results of the research showed that all the explanatory variables were statistically significant at the level of 1% and that the model was significant as a whole according to the statistic F and the value of R2=0.99. Economically, we find that the parameter of the average per capita GDP was 0.46 and it came with a positive signal consistent with the methodology of the Environmental Curve Kuznets ECK, the parameter of per capita energy consumption was 0.04, and it came with a negative sign that contradicts the Kuznets methodology,  the reason may belong to the conditions that   affected the country after 2003. The research recommended to go to investing in renewable energy, because it is environmentally friendly, such as sun energy, and to reduce the size of the gas in the sectors emitting to it, such as the transport sector, factories, the extraction sector, and manufacturing industries, in order to preserve the integrity of the environment and the plant and animal wealth it contains ,to a better environment in Iraq.


2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 290-310 ◽  
Author(s):  
Georgeta Soava ◽  
Anca Mehedintu ◽  
Mihaela Sterpu

This paper analyses the relationship between the following indicators: income inequality, gross domestic product, risk of poverty threshold and median equivalized net income for a panel of 28 countries of European Union (EU) over the period 2005-2016. Two theoretical regression models, a linear and a quadratic one, are used to estimate the influence on income inequality of the other three indicators. Empirical estimations, using panel data techniques on three different data panels, confirm the Kuznets hypothesis that income inequality tends to increase with early economic development and tends to decrease when a country reaches a certain level of development. We found that for emerging EU countries, income inequality has a growing tendency with a positive economic growth and maybe reduced by increasing risk of poverty threshold or median equivalized net income. For highly developed EU countries the situation is completely opposite. At EU level, the influence of gross domestic product on income inequality is strongly determined by its trend in the highly developed EU countries, while the influence of risk of poverty threshold and median equivalized net income on income inequality is strongly determined by their trend in the emerging EU countries.


Author(s):  
Redwan Ahmed ◽  
Gabriela Sabau ◽  
Morteza Haghiri

One of the controversial debates in environmental economics, which began in the 1980s, is the relationship between environmental pollution and economic growth. The study investigated the relationship between per capita carbon dioxide emissions and gross domestic product per capita in 63 countries over 51 years during 1960 to 2010. Using a graphical analysis approach, the results of this study showed that the relationship between per capita carbon dioxide emissions and gross domestic product per capita amongst the sample data followed a sigmoid curve indicating that the per capita carbon dioxide emissions of a country increased when its economy transitioned from a labor-intensive technology to a capital-intensive one caused by an increase in the rate of economic growth. The results also showed that the amount of relative emissions varied amongst the countries. The variability could be imputed to the following reasons: (i) the heterogeneity in the structure of the economies, and (ii) the disparity in the mode of production used in the countries’ manufacturing processes.     


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