The Rising Cost of Hospital Care, by Martin S. Feldstein. Washington: Information Resources Press, 1971, 88 pp., $4.25

PEDIATRICS ◽  
1973 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 326-327
Author(s):  
Leonard W. Cronkite
Keyword(s):  
Hospital Cost ◽  
Hospital Care ◽  
Supply And Demand ◽  
Information Resources ◽  
Complex Issue ◽  
The Past ◽  
Hospital Economics ◽  
Underlying Causes ◽  
Lay Reader

Dr. Feldstein has produced an essay of extraordinary clarity for the lay reader. He bravely tackles the incredibly complex issue of hospital economics. He analyzes the course of hospital cost inflation during the past 20 years and attempts to define the underlying causes. Unlike many economists he does not fall into the trap of comparing hospitals with other industries nor does he try to apply the simplistic laws of supply and demand as they apply to the manufacturer of goods.

scholarly journals Assessing the Prospects of Transboundary Multihazard Dynamics: The Case of Bhotekoshi—Sunkoshi Watershed in Sino—Nepal Border Region

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (7) ◽  
pp. 3670
Author(s):  
Suraj Lamichhane ◽  
Komal Raj Aryal ◽  
Rocky Talchabhadel ◽  
Bhesh Raj Thapa ◽  
Rabindra Adhikari ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Built Environment ◽  
Natural Hazards ◽  
Complex Dynamics ◽  
Local Level ◽  
Individual Case ◽  
Border Region ◽  
Multiple Hazards ◽  
The Past ◽  
Transboundary Watersheds ◽  
Underlying Causes

The impacts of multihazards have become more pronounced over the past few decades globally. Multiple hazards and their cascading impacts claim enormous losses of lives, livelihoods, and built environment. This paradigm prompts integrated and multidisciplinary perspectives to identify, characterize, and assess the occurrence of multihazards and subsequently design countermeasures considering impending multihazard scenarios at the local level. To this end, we considered one of the most egregious transboundary watersheds, which is regarded as a multihazard hotspot of Nepal, to analyze the underlying causes and cascade scenarios of multihazards, and their associated impacts. In this paper, geophysical, hydrometeorological, and socioeconomic perspectives are formulated to characterize the watershed from the dimension of susceptibility to multihazard occurrence. To characterize the complex dynamics of transboundary multihazard occurrence, insights have been presented from both the Nepali and the Chinese sides. Individual case studies and the interrelation matrix between various natural hazards are also presented so as to depict multihazard consequences in the transboundary region. The sum of the observations highlights that the watershed is highly vulnerable to a single as well as multiple natural hazards that often switch to disasters.

Leaning on Legionnaires: Why Modern States Recruit Foreign Soldiers

2021 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 147-195
Author(s):  
Elizabeth M.F. Grasmeder
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Supply And Demand ◽  
Military Power ◽  
Test Case ◽  
World War ◽  
Political Factors ◽  
The Past ◽  
Original Dataset ◽  
Rapid Changes ◽  
Multimethod Approach

Abstract Why do modern states recruit legionnaires—foreigners who are neither citizens nor subjects of the country whose military they serve? Rather than exclusively enlist citizens for soldiers, for the past two centuries states have mobilized legionnaires to help wage offensives, project power abroad, and suppress dissent. A supply-and-demand argument explains why states recruit these troops, framing the choice to mobilize legionnaires as a function of political factors that constrain the government's leeway to recruit domestically and its perceptions about the territorial threats it faces externally. A multimethod approach evaluates these claims, first by examining an original dataset of legionnaire recruitment from 1815 to 2020, then by employing congruence tests across World War II participants, and finally by conducting a detailed review of a hard test case for the argument—Nazi Germany. The prevalence of states’ recruitment of legionnaires calls for a reevaluation of existing narratives about the development of modern militaries and provides new insights into how states balance among the competing imperatives of identity, norms, and security. Legionnaire recruitment also underscores the need to recalibrate existing methods of calculating net assessments and preparing for strategic surprise. Far from being bound to a state's citizenry or borders, the theory and evidence show how governments use legionnaires to buttress their military power and to engineer rapid changes in the quality and quantity of the soldiers that they field.

scholarly journals Reimagining unfinished architectures: ruin perspectives between art and heritage

2018 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-244
Author(s):  
Pablo Arboleda
Keyword(s):  
Financial Crisis ◽  
Broad Spectrum ◽  
Organised Crime ◽  
Public Works ◽  
Architectural Style ◽  
2008 Financial Crisis ◽  
Complex Issue ◽  
The Past ◽  
Single Solution ◽  
The 2008 Financial Crisis

For the past five decades, hundreds of unfinished public works have been erected in Italy as the result of inconsistent planning and the presence of corruption and organised crime. A third of these constructions are located in Sicily alone, and so, in 2007, a group of artists labelled this phenomenon an architectural style: ‘ Incompiuto Siciliano’. Through this creative approach, the artists’ objective is to put incompletion back on the agenda by viewing it from a heritage perspective. This article reviews the different approaches that the artists have envisaged to handle unfinished public works; whether to finish them, demolish them, leave them as they are or opt for an ‘active’ arrested decay. The critical implications of these strategies are analysed in order to, ultimately, conclude that incompletion is such a vast and complex issue that it will surely have more than one single solution; but rather a combination of these four. This is important because it opens up a debate on the broad spectrum of possibilities to tackle incompletion – establishing this as one of the key contemporary urban themes not only in Italy but also in those countries affected by unfinished geographies after the 2008 financial crisis.

Obsessive Planning in Transitional Vietnam

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 1-47 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Benedikter ◽  
Loan T. P. Nguyen
Keyword(s):  
Economic System ◽  
Planning System ◽  
Reform Process ◽  
Governance System ◽  
State Planning ◽  
Policy Regime ◽  
The Past ◽  
Dominant Feature ◽  
Underlying Causes ◽  
Government Initiative

This essay offers reflections on Vietnam’s post-socialist state planning system and an upcoming government initiative to reform it. Thirty years after the departure from Soviet-style central planning, state-directed planning prevails as the dominant feature of Vietnam’s governance system, policy regime, and economic system. Our purpose is to examine why state-directed planning has been so resilient despite its many associated drawbacks in the past and present. We present a range of critical thoughts on the underlying causes and drivers that have preserved state-directed planning and that may jeopardize the nascent reform process.

Wills Lifestyle in India

2017 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Sunil Chopra
Keyword(s):  
Supply Chain ◽  
Raw Materials ◽  
Supply And Demand ◽  
Third Parties ◽  
The Past ◽  
Relative Value ◽  
High Level

In 2003, ITC responded to the high level of obsolete inventory by shifting risk from finished products to manufacturing and raw materials. This required that their supply chain be much more flexible and responsive than it was in the past. By 2006, changes in the supply chain that included moving manufacturing in-house improved flexibility and responsiveness. Obsolete inventory was significantly reduced and the company was much better at matching supply and demand. Cost, however, continued to be higher than that at third parties. The company had to decide on the appropriate tradeoff between cost and responsiveness when structuring its supply chain.The case illustrates how Wills has changed its supply chain to become more flexible and responsive. This change, however, has come at a cost. The case requires the students to analyze the tradeoff between cost and responsiveness/flexibility to decide on an appropriate level of flexibility/responsiveness. The case also requires the student to understand the relative value of increased flexibility versus increased responsiveness.

scholarly journals Libraries as Integrators of E-Resources of the Historical and Biographic Information

2014 ◽  
pp. 42-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
V. I. Popik
Keyword(s):  
Information Resources ◽  
Biographical Information ◽  
The Past

The article considers the role and possibilities of libraries in formation and integration of the resources of biographical information on the personalities of history and culture of the past. There is analyzed the experience of a number of the world’s largest libraries in accumulating and systematization of printed and electronic biographical information resources, implementation of the scientific-methodical and consultancy work with readers, preparation of guides to collections of libraries, biobibliographic references, dictionaries and reference books.

Drivers of Organizational Participation in XML-based Industry Standardization Efforts

2010 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 20-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rubén A. Mendoza ◽  
T. Ravichandran
Keyword(s):  
Business Processes ◽  
Supply And Demand ◽  
Markup Language ◽  
Demand Side ◽  
End User ◽  
Organizational Participation ◽  
The Past ◽  
Data Formats ◽  
Extensible Markup ◽  
And Diffusion

XML-based vertical standards are an emerging compatibility standard for describing business processes and data formats in specific industries that have emerged in the past decade. Vertical standards, typically implemented using eXtensible Markup Language (XML), are incomplete products in constant evolution, continually adding functionality to reflect changing business needs. Vertical standards are public goods because they are freely obtained from sponsoring organizations without investing resources in their development, which gives rise to linked collective action dilemmas at the development and diffusion stages. Firms must be persuaded to invest in development without being able to profit from the output, and a commitment to ensure the diffusion of the standard must be secured from enough potential adopters to guarantee success. In this paper, the authors explore organizational drivers for participation in vertical standards development activities for supply- and demand-side organizations (i.e., vendors and end-user firms) in light of the restrictions imposed by these dilemmas.

scholarly journals Israel-Palestine: The pedagogical challenge

2011 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald Grayston ◽  
Dave Chang
Keyword(s):  
Public Education ◽  
Interest Groups ◽  
Special Interest Groups ◽  
Ministry Of Education ◽  
Complex Issue ◽  
The Past ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
Pedagogical Approaches ◽  
Pedagogical Challenge ◽  
The Way

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict began in a critical sense in 1948 and continues to this day.  An understanding of this continuing dispute requires knowledge of its historical, political, religious, demographic, emotional and geopolitical dimensions, and of the way anti-semitism figures in how people engage in discussions of the Middle-East.  After sketching out these realities, we consider how disagreement over the framing of the past generates disagreement over visions of the future.  Drawing on the work of Jakob Feldt and Ilan Gur-ze’ev, among others, we highlight the challenges posed to educators in regard to how each of the two major narratives, Israeli and Palestinian, compete with the Other’s account of their shared and fractured history.  Using an incident involving the British Columbia Ministry of Education as a reference point, we explore the way special interest groups engage with the realm of public education, as well as the challenge of deconstructing conflicting historical interpretations.  The paper suggests some pedagogical approaches for moving beyond the contesting of histories and for the development of better-grounded student involvement with this complex issue.

Causality in Islamic marketing research

2020 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Djavlonbek Kadirov ◽  
Ibraheem Bahiss ◽  
Ahmet Bardakcı
Keyword(s):  
Design Methodology ◽  
Marketing Research ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Theory Building ◽  
Complex Issue ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Research Perspective ◽  
The Past ◽  
Conceptual Paper ◽  
Practical Implications

Purpose Highlighting the need for a profound move towards desecularisation of Islamic scholarship, this conceptual paper aims to clarify the concept of causality from the Islamic marketing research perspective and extends a number of suggestions for improving theory building and hypothesis development in the field. Design/methodology/approach The approach taken is largely conceptual. In addition, this study collates the stated hypotheses in the articles published in this journal in the past five years and analyses the structure of causal statements to uncover key tendencies. Findings The review of historical and current views on causality indicates that most commentators agree that assuming the existence of the necessary connection between cause and effect is misleading. The Islamic traditions based on occasionalism and modern science agree that causal statements reflect, at best, probabilistic assumptions. Research limitations/implications This paper offers a number of insights and recommendations for theory building and hypothesis development in Islamic marketing. By following the occasionalism perspective and the notion of Sunnah of Allah, researchers will be able to build methodologically coherent and genuine Islamic marketing knowledge. Practical implications Correctly stated and tested hypotheses can be used by public policymakers to enforce effective consumer and market policies. Originality/value This paper tackles a complex issue of causality in Islamic marketing research which has not hitherto been discussed well in the literature. This research is also a unique step towards developing pioneering avenues within the domain of Islamic marketing research methodology.

scholarly journals Supply and demand drive a critical transition to dysfunctional fisheries

2017 ◽  
Vol 114 (46) ◽  
pp. 12333-12337 ◽  
Author(s):  
John M. Fryxell ◽  
Ray Hilborn ◽  
Carling Bieg ◽  
Katrine Turgeon ◽  
Amanda Caskenette ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Fishery Management ◽  
Supply And Demand ◽  
Real Income ◽  
High Yield ◽  
High Price ◽  
Economic Systems ◽  
Critical Transition ◽  
The Past ◽  
Critical Transitions ◽  
Management Policies

There is growing awareness of the need for fishery management policies that are robust to changing environmental, social, and economic pressures. Here we use conventional bioeconomic theory to demonstrate that inherent biological constraints combined with nonlinear supply−demand relationships can generate threshold effects due to harvesting. As a result, increases in overall demand due to human population growth or improvement in real income would be expected to induce critical transitions from high-yield/low-price fisheries to low-yield/high-price fisheries, generating severe strains on social and economic systems as well as compromising resource conservation goals. As a proof of concept, we show that key predictions of the critical transition hypothesis are borne out in oceanic fisheries (cod and pollock) that have experienced substantial increase in fishing pressure over the past 60 y. A hump-shaped relationship between price and historical harvest returns, well demonstrated in these empirical examples, is particularly diagnostic of fishery degradation. Fortunately, the same heuristic can also be used to identify reliable targets for fishery restoration yielding optimal bioeconomic returns while safely conserving resource abundance.

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