Age-period-cohort analysis of oral cancer mortality in Europe: the end of an epidemic?

Over the last decade, mortality from oral and pharyngeal cancer has been declining in most European countries, but it had been increasing substantially in Hungary, Slovakia and a few other countries of central Europe, reaching rates comparable to those of lung cancer in several western European countries in males. To update trends in oral cancer mortality and further analyse the recent epidemic in central Europe, official death certifications for oral and pharyngeal cancer for 37 European countries were derived over the period 1970-2007, and an age-period-cohort model was fitted for selected countries. Male oral cancer mortality continued to decline in most European countries, including the Russian Federation, and, more importantly, it also started to decline in some of the countries with the highest male rates, i.e. Hungary and Slovakia; persisting rises were, however, observed in Belarus, Bulgaria and Romania. Oral cancer mortality rates for women were lower than in men and showed no appreciable trend over recent periods in the EU overall. Estimates from the age-period-cohort analysis for most selected countries showed a fall in effects for the cohorts born after the 1950s. For the period effect displayed a rise for the earlier periods, an inversion in the 1990s and a continuous fall up to the last studied period. Only some former non-market economy countries, like Romania, Ukraine and Lithuania, had rising cohort effect trends up to most recent generations. The major finding of this updated analysis of oral cancer mortality is the leveling of the epidemic for men in most European countries, including Hungary and other central European countries, where mortality from this cancer was exceedingly high. These trends essentially reflect the changes in alcohol and tobacco consumption in various populations.

Market-Based Instruments for ecosystem services: institutional innovation or renovation?

Recent years have seen widespread experimentation with market-based instruments (MBIs) for the provision of environmental goods and ecosystem services. However, little attention has been paid to their design or to the effects of the underlying pro-market narrative on environmental policy instruments. The purpose of this article is to analyze the emergence and dissemination of the term "market-based instruments" applied to the provision of environmental services and to assess to what extent the instruments associated are genuinely innovative. The recommendation to develop markets can lead in practice to a variety of institutional forms, as we show it based on the example of payments for environmental services (PES) and biodiversity offsets, two very different mechanisms that are both presented in the literature as MBIs. Our purpose is to highlight the gap between discourse and practice in connection with MBIs.

State-Society Relationships, Social Trust and the Development of Labour Market Policies in Italy and Sweden

The first decade of the twenty-first century may be remembered for the rebirth of consensus on labour market policy. After three decades of bitter political and ideological controversy between a neo-liberal and a traditional social democratic approach, a new model, often labelled flexicurity, has emerged. This model is promoted by numerous political organisations since it promises to put an end to the old trade-off between equality and efficiency. Several countries are embracing the flexicurity model as a blueprint for labour market reform, but others, mostly belonging to the 'Mediterranean Rim', are clearly lagging behind. Why is it so difficult for these countries to implement the flexicurity model? This paper argues that the application of a flexicurity strategy in these countries is complicated by the lack of social trust between social partners and the state as well as political economy traditions that highlight the role of labour market regulation as a source of social protection.