Systematic review and analysis of evidences on clinical efficacy and cost-effectiveness of biological drugs for the treatment of Ankylosing Spondylitis

Technology: Infliximab and comparator biological such as adalimumab, etanercept, golimumab. Conditions: Ankylosing spondylitis (AS) Issue: Infliximab is registered to be used in patients with AS. The aim of the Report is to evaluate the clinical efficacy and safety of infliximab and comparator biologicals for the treatment of adult AS. Methods: Systematic literature review and analysis as well as meta-analysis (direct and indirect comparison) of published randomised controlled clinical trials (RCT) were performed, all relevant health economics literature were identified ad analysed. Results: Clinical efficacy of biological therapies is based on good clinical evidences regarding to all clinical efficacy endpoints (ASAS20, ASAS40, ASAS 5/6, and BASDAI 50% response). Altogether, 22 trials are included in our meta-analysis, 12 infliximab, 3 adalimumab studies, 6 etanercept and 1 golimumab. Efficacy of biological treatments for the treatment of AS has been established by clinical scientific evidences, significant improvement at all outcomes considered was confirmed. According to the results of indirect comparison, there were no significant difference between biological treatments and placebo in terms of safety and tolerability endpoints. We found no significant difference between the clinical efficacy and safety of infliximab, adalimumab, etanercept and golimumab therapies. Cost-utility analysis of adalimumab and/or infliximab, etanercept and golimumab treatment for AS were performed in the UK, Canada, The Netherlands, Germany, Spain and France. There are no cost-utility studies from Eastern Central Europe. Implications for decision making: Efficacy of infliximab and comparator biologicals for the treatment of Ankylosing Spondylitis (AS) was proved by clinical evidence, significant improvement at all outcomes considered was confirmed. We found no significant differences in efficacy and safety of different biological treatments. Health economics results suggest that biological therapies are cost-effective alternatives for the treatment of AS in group of developed high income countries. There is a lack of health economics results in Central-Eastern European countries however these data are more and more required by governments and funders as part of the company economic dossiers.

Gondolatok az egyensúlyról a játékelméletben

A tanulmány a Nash egyensúly és a korrelált egyensúly interpretációjával, a racionalitással való kapcsolatával és a Nash egyensúly axiomatikus megalapozásával foglalkozik. Problémákat vet fel, kételyeket fogalmaz meg és válaszokat keres. Foglalkozik többek között a lineáris duopólium Nash egyensúlyának iterált dominancia alapján történő meghatározásával, a visszafele indukció és a Nash egyensúly konzisztencia alapon való axiomatizálásának analógiájával. A korrelált egyensúly iterálásának a lehetőségét a gyáva nyúl játékon mutatja be, és a korrelált egyensúly Aumann-féle interpretációjának egy módosításával is foglalkozik. A problémák felvetése és a válaszok már egy bevezető játékelméleti kurzusban is hasznosíthatók.

Duopólium részben állami tulajdonú vállalattal

A piaci szabályozás egyik lehetséges eszköze, hogy az állam egy oligopol piacon egyik versenyző vállalatban megszerzett részesedésén keresztül terelje a piacot a kívánt irányba, a társadalmi jólét növelése érdekében. Ebben a tanulmányban egy Bertrand-Edgeworth típusú versenykörnyezetben vizsgáljuk meg a részben állami tulajdonú vállalat lehetséges jólétnövelő hatását. Választ keresünk arra a kérdésre is, hogy mekkora legyen az állam optimális részesedése az általa részben irányított vállalatban.

Rethinking Kyoto Compliance from a Consumption-Based Perspective.

Environmental consequences of international trade are quite relevant for climate change policy. Apparent decoupling of GHG emission and GDP growth, observed in several European countries, is partly due to the increasing dislocation of manufacturing industries from the developed world to emerging economies. Consequently, decoupling is coupled with increasing GHG emission embodied in imported products from these nations. The article scrutinises the GHG emission embedded in Hungarian import of Chinese products. It argues that a stagnating GHG emission observed in Hungary is intertwined with hidden GHG export to China that takes place through trading of goods. Objective evaluation of compliance status with Kyoto targets would require a consumption-based accounting of GHG emissions rather than a production-based one, unless we accept facing a BIG problem at global level.

A közlekedés fenntarthatósága – közösségi közlekedés jövője

Közlekedésszakmai berkekben általános vélemény, hogy az egyéni közlekedés növekedési ütemének megállítása, vagy legalábbis mérséklése akkor valósítható meg, ha a közösségi közlekedés attraktivitása elér egy olyan szintet, amikor az egyéni közlekedéssel szemben megfelelő alternatívát nyújt. Minél többen veszik igénybe a közösségi közlekedést, annál inkább csökkennek a negatív környezeti hatások, így a zsúfoltság, a levegő szennyezése, a torlódás, a földterület felhasználása, a balesetek száma, a zajhatás. A közösségi közlekedés akkor lehet vonzó, ha az szabályozott verseny feltételei közepette működik, fenntartható és a mobilitás-menedzsment formálja a jövőjét.

A közigazgatás jövőképe

A tanulmány az internet alapú infokommunikációs technológia lehetőségeit próbálja felvázolni elsősorban az igazgatási ügyfélszolgálatban. Ennek térbelisége a posztinternetes háromdimenziós virtuális környezetben érhető tetten, amely egyúttal a jövő távolságok nélküli világát igazolja vissza a közigazgatási ügyfélszolgálat példáján. Itt is igaz Enyedi György látszólag örökérvényű megállapítása: aki rajta van a hálózaton, az a központban van akkor is, ha fizikailag több száz kilométerre van a központtól. Aki pedig nincs rajta a hálózaton, az végtelen távolságra kerül a központtól akkor is, ha fizikailag a központban van.

Forgatókönyvek készítése a hazai, lakossági hasznosítású IKT lehetséges jövőire

A lakossági fogyasztású IKT trendekről adok egy áttekintést, kitérve a globális és a hazai trendekre. Az eszközoldal bemutatása után a hazai fiatalok információs és kommunikációs technológiai eszközökkel kapcsolatos preferenciái alapján a humán tényező szerepére helyezem a hangsúlyt. A második fejezetben a forgatókönyvek készítésének fontosságát fejtem ki, és folyamatábráját szemléltetem. Végezetül a korábban felvezetett humán és a technológiai oldal beépítését emelem ki az infokommunikációs forgatókönyvek készítése szempontjából és további kutatási irányokat jelölök ki.

The Impact of Chinese Culture on European Landscape Design

The English garden design style and the landscape garden movement became the most emblematic cultural achievement of England in the 18th-19th century. The natural garden style proved to be the symbol of the liberal philosophy and the enlightened way of thinking. But the English landscape garden, which can be seen as an idealized view of nature, is inspired by the classical landscape paintings and is also influenced by the classic Chinese gardens, which had recently been described by European travellers. The interest for Chinese culture, architecture and garden design spread around the British island and inspired the talented garden designers. The gardens of Chambers created a new section in the picturesque landscape gardens, the so called anglo-chinoiseric gardens where eastern, mainly Chinese architectural motives and garden elements have been used in most cases without integrating the Chinese nature philosophy. This first, more or less formal effects of Chinese garden design on European landscape architecture were overwritten by garden designers and horticulturalist during the gardenesque period of the early 19th century when great variety in plant design was taken into the focus of landscape architecture.

Post Crisis Lessons for Open Economies: Are They All New?

This paper will argue that the American economy could and will absorb the recent shocks, and that in the longer run (within a matter of years), it will somehow convert the revealed weaknesses to its advantage. America has a long record of learning from its excesses to improve the working of its particular brand of capitalism, dating back to the imposition of antitrust controls on the robber barons in the late 1800s and the enhancement of investor protection after the 1929 crash. The American economy has experienced market imperfections of all kinds but it almost always has found, true, not perfect, but fairly reliable regulatory answers and has managed to adapt to change, (e. g. Dodd-Frank Act on financial stability). The U.S. has many times pioneered in the elaboration of both theoretical and policy oriented solutions for conflicts between markets and government to increase economic welfare (Bernanke, 2008, p. 425). There is no single reason why it should not turn the latest financial calamities to its advantage. At the same time, to regain confidence in capitalism as a global system, global efforts are indispensable. To identify some of the global economic conflicts that have a lot to do with U.S. markets in particular, we seek answers to global systemic questions.

Mobile Phones and Sustainable Consumption in China: an Empirical Study among Young Chinese Citizens

This millennium the number of mobile phones has exponentially grown in Western nations, however China is now the biggest mobile phone market. The present study contains questions about the sustainability aspects of purchasing mobile phones: both of the mobile phones purchase itself, and how mobile phones are used to gather environmental and health information for consumption. The results of the present study suggest, that mobile phones became an important source of information about environmental protection issues, but the specific applications do not play an important role as a source of information about environmental conscious consumption yet.

Measuring Benefits of Technology Spillovers from Foreign Direct Investment in Central and Eastern Europe

In this paper, we construct a composite indicator to estimate the potential of four Central and Eastern European countries (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia) to benefit from productivity spillovers from foreign direct investment (FDI) in the manufacturing sector. Such transfers of technology are one of the main benefits of FDI for the host country, and should also be one of the main determinants of FDI incentives offered to investing multinationals by governments, but they are difficult to assess ex ante. For our composite index, we use six components to proxy the main channels and determinants of these spillovers. We have tried several weighting and aggregation methods, and we consider our results robust. According to the analysis of our results, between 2003 and 2007 all four countries were able to increase their potential to benefit from such spillovers, although there are large differences between them. The Czech Republic clearly has the most potential to benefit from productivity spillovers, while Poland has the least. The relative positions of Hungary and Slovakia depend to some extent on the exact weighting and aggregation method of the individual components of the index, but the differences are not large. These conclusions have important implications both for the investment strategies of multinationals and government FDI policies.

Optimizing Supply Chain Performance in China with Country-Specific Supply Chain Coordination

The implementation of country-specific supply chain coordination techniques ensures an optimal global supply chain performance. This paper looks at success factors going with a supply chain coordination strategy within the global supply chain of a successful, medium-sized, privately-owned company, one having locations in North America (USA), Europe (Hungary) and Asia (China). Through the shown GSL’s Chinese plant, we will endeavor to argue that increased collaboration in the supply network with appropriate supply chain coordination brings down not only the inventory level but can also improve conformance quality and reduce quoted lead times.

Cross-country and inter-temporal analysis of Supply Chain Integration (SCI): China, Hungary and the Netherlands - changes in SCI from 1996 to 2008

Using plant level data from a global survey with multiple time frames, one begun in the late 1990s, this paper introduces measures of supply chain integration and discusses the dynamic relationship between the level of integration and a set of internal and external performance measurements. Specifically, data from Hungary, The Netherlands and The People’s Republic of China are used in the analyses. The time frames considered range from the late 1990s till 2009, encompassing major changes and transitions. Our results seem to indicate that SCI has an underlying structure of four sets of indicators, namely: (1) delivery frequency from the supplier or to the customer; (2) sharing internal processes with suppliers; (3) sharing internal processes with buyers and (4) joint facility location with partners. The differences between groups in terms of several performance measures proved to be small, being mostly statistically insignificant - but looking at the ANOVA table we can conclude that in this sample of companies those having joint location with their partners seem to outperform others.

Technology Policy, R&D, and Innovation in China Traditional Approaches, and New Challenges

China’s long term development path has always been strongly infl uenced by its own ways of innovation and invention. Though around one thousand years ago China had been undoubtedly the most advanced country in the world, by the 17th century Europe had surpassed it. And when the PRC was founded in 1949, it was only a poor, severely underdeveloped country without adequate, modern technologies. In the last three decades, however, the country has achieved remarkable success in economic terms: China has become the second largest economy in the world, and its new economic, fi nancial and trading power has made it clear that the dominance of the USA and Europe has passed. At the same time China is still lagging behind technologically. Though there are huge efforts to narrow the gap, it is extremely diffi cult to build up a new technological and innovation system without deep, organic foundations. China, however, has rich experience of innovations from the past, and the question is whether it is possible to use them to formulate a new technology policy. In this paper I will try to examine China’s technology system, its functioning and its prospects, while comparing it with the traditional ways of innovations in China. I would like to show that current technology policy is, at least partly, based upon traditional values, and that high tech research, R&D, and state of the art innovations can be reconcilable with several thousand-year-old approaches.