Cost of stroke in Australia from a societal perspective: results from the north east Melbourne stroke incidence study (NEMESIS)

Background and Purpose—— Accurate information about resource use and costs of stroke is necessary for informed health service planning. The purpose of this study was to determine the patterns of resource use among stroke patients and to estimate the total costs (direct service use and indirect production losses) of stroke (excluding SAH) in Australia for 1997.

Methods—— An incidence-based cost-of-illness model was developed, incorporating data obtained from the North East Melbourne Stroke Incidence Study (NEMESIS). The costs of stroke during the first year after stroke and the present value of total lifetime costs of stroke were estimated.

Results—— The total first-year costs of all first-ever-in-a lifetime strokes (SAH excluded) that occurred in Australia during 1997 were estimated to be A$555 million (US$420 million), and the present value of lifetime costs was estimated to be A$1.3 billion (US$985 million). The average cost per case during the first 12 months and over a lifetime was A$18 956 (US$14 361) and A$44 428 (US$33 658), respectively. The most important categories of cost during the first year were acute hospitalization (A$154 million), inpatient rehabilitation (A$150 million), and nursing home care (A$63 million). The present value of lifetime indirect costs was estimated to be A$34 million.

Conclusions—— Similar to other studies, hospital and nursing home costs contributed most to the total cost of stroke (excluding SAH) in Australia. Inpatient rehabilitation accounts for {approx}27% of total first-year costs. Given the magnitude of these costs, investigation of the cost-effectiveness of rehabilitation services should become a priority in this community.

Trade liberalisation and economic growth in Fiji : an empirical assessment using the ARDL approach

This study investigates the effect of trade liberalization on economic performance in Fiji using a Cobb-Douglas production function, which is expanded to take into account political instability and trade liberalization. The long run results conform to theoretical expectations, except for the contribution of labour force, which is negatively related to real Gross Domestic Product. We attribute this to the rapid and consistent emigration of skilled labour following the 1987 coups. While human capital was found to be the most influential variable, exports and investment were found to be weakly related to Gross Domestic Product. The key finding is that the dummy variable for signing the IMF agreement in 1984 had a statistically significant positive effect on real Gross Domestic Product in the long run, but the short run effects of signing the agreement as well as the short run and long run effects of implementing the agreement in 1986 were statistically insignificant.

Inflation and economic growth : a comparative analysis of Australia and the Philippines

Investigates the effects of inflation on economic growth in Australia and the Philippines using time-series data for each country. Uses time-series quarterly data sets covering the period 1970-1995 for Australia and 1950-1994 for the Philippines. A production function approach is used. Inflation was found to have a negative and statistically significant but differing impact on growth in both countries.

The role of capital-labour substitution in economic growth

Purpose – Although the importance of the elasticity of substitution between capital and labour (s) has been recognized in many areas in economics, this parameter has not received enough attention in economic growth. The purpose of this paper is to review the recent development in the importance of s in economic growth.

Design/methodology/approach – This paper specifically reviews the possibility of perpetual growth and slowdown, and the asymptotic behaviour of the balanced growth path for different values of s. It also reviews the determinants of the aggregate s.

Findings – Based on the empirical evidence that the value of s significantly departs from the Cobb-Douglas value of unity, the paper recommends employing the constant elasticity of substitution (CES) production function in both theoretical and empirical growth research.

Originality/value – This paper offers a new perspective on the elasticity of substitution between capital and labour due to its evaluation of various factors, methods and approaches.

Determinants of school attendance among migrant children: survey evidence from China's Jiangsu province

Across the developing world education is seen as a means of raising levels of everyday wellbeing and is being linked to improved measures of productivity and economic growth. This paper employs a household production function framework to examine the determinants of school attendance among migrant children using a unique dataset collected in China's Jiangsu province. The study finds that the main predictors of school attendance among migrant children in the sample were household income, mother's education, the length of residence of the child's mother in the city and whether both parents were working in the same city. © 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Applied econometrics and implications for energy economics research

Developments in applied econometrics, particularly with regard to unit root tests and cointegration tests, have motivated a rich empirical literature on energy economics over the last decade. This study reviews recent developments in time series econometrics applications in the energy economics literature. We first consider the literature on the integration properties of energy variables. We begin with a discussion of the implications of whether energy variables contain a unit root and proceed to examine how results differ according to the specific unit root or stationarity test employed. We then proceed to examine recent developments in the literature on cointegration, Granger causality and long-run estimates between (disaggregated) energy consumption and economic growth. We review both single country and panel studies and pay particular attention to studies which have expanded the literature through adding variables such as financial development and trade, in addition to energy consumption to the augmented production function, as well as studies which have extended the literature through examining disaggregated energy consumption by type. In each case we highlight best practice in the literature, point to limitations in the literature, including econometric modeling challenges, and suggest recommendations for future research. A key message of our survey is that the profession needs to guard against 'overload' of research in these areas as most applied studies are no longer adding anything more to what is already known. © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

A note on policy, the composition of public expenditures and economic growth

In this article we study the growth and welfare effects of fiscal and monetary policies in economies where public investment is part of the productive process we present four different models that share the same technology with public infrastructure as a separate argument of the production function. We show that growth is maximized at positive levels of income tax and inflation. However, unless there are no transfers or public goods in the economy, maximization of growth does not imply welfare maximization we show that the optimal tax rate is greater than the rate that maximizes growth and the optimal rate of money creation is below the growth maximizing rate. With public infrastructure in the production function we no longer obtain superneutrality in the Sidrausky model.

The implications of embodiment and Putty-Clay to economic development

In this paper we construct and analyze a growth model with the following three ingredients. (i) Technological progress is embodied. (ii) The production function of a firm is such that the firm makes both technology upgrade as well as capital and labor decisions. (iii) The firm’s production technology is putty-clay. We assume that there are disincentives to the accumulation of capital, resulting in a divergence between the social and the private cost of investment. We solve a single firm’s problem in this environment. Then we determine general equilibrium prices of capital goods of different vintages. Using these prices we aggregate firms’ decisions and construct the theoretical analogues of National Income statistics. This generates a relationship between disincentives and per capita incomes. We analyze this relationship and show the quantitative and qualitative roles of embodiment and putty-clay. We also show how the model is taken to data, quantified and used to determine to what extent income gaps across countries can be attributed to disincentives.

Testing the externalities hypothesis of endogenous growth using cointegration

The initial endogenous growth models emphasized the importance of externaI effects in explaining sustainable growth across time. Empirically, this hypothesis can be confirmed if the coefficient of physical capital per hour is unity in the aggregate production function. Although cross-section results concur with theory, previous estimates using time series data rejected this hypothesis, showing a small coefficient far from unity. It seems that the problem lies not with the theory but with the techniques employed, which are unable to capture low frequency movements in high frequency data. This paper uses cointegration - a technique designed to capture the existence of long-run relationships in multivariate time series - to test the externalities hypothesis of endogenous growth. The results confirm the theory' and conform to previous cross-section estimates. We show that there is long-run proportionality between output per hour and a measure of capital per hour. U sing this result, we confmn the hypothesis that the implied Solow residual can be explained by government expenditures on infra-structure, which suggests a supply side role for government affecting productivity and a decrease on the extent that the Solow residual explains the variation of output.

The impact of public capital and public investment on economic growth: an empirical investigation

in this anicle we measure the impact of public sector capital and investment on economic growth. Initially, traditional growth accounting regressions are run for a cross-country data set. A simple endogenous growth model is then constructed in order to take into account the determinants of labor, private capital and public capital. In both cases, public capital is a separate argument of the production function. An additional data-set constructed with quarterly American data was used in the estimations of the growth mode!. The results indicate lhat public capital and public investment play a significant role in determining growth rates and have a significant impact on capital and labor returns. Furthermore, the impact of public investment on productivity growth was found to be positive and always significant for bolh samples. Hence. in a fully optimizing modelo we confmn previous results in the literature that lhe failure of public investment to keep pace with output growlh during the Seventies and Eighties may have played a major role in the slowdown of lhe productivity growth in the period. Anolher main outcome concems the output elasticity wilh respect to public capital. The coefficiem estimates are always positive and significant but magnitudes depend on each of lhe two data set used.

Growth, increasing returns, and public infrastructure : time series evidence

Initial endogenous growth models emphasized the importance of external effects and increasing retums in explaining growth. Empirically, this hypothesis can be confumed if the coefficient of physical capital per hour is unity in the aggregate production function. Previous estimates using time series data rejected this hypothesis, although cross-country estimates did nol The problem lies with the techniques employed, which are unable to capture low-frequency movements of high-frequency data. Using cointegration, new time series evidence confum the theory and conform to cross-country evidence. The implied Solow residual, which takes into account externaI effects to aggregate capital, has its behavior analyzed. The hypothesis that it is explained by government expenditures on infrasttucture is confIrmed. This suggests a supply-side role for government affecting productivity.

Public expenditures taxation and welfare measurement

this article addresses the welfare and macroeconomics effects of fiscal policy in a frarnework where govemment chooses tax rates and the distribution of revenues between consumption and investment. We construct and simulate a model where public consumption affects individuaIs' utility and public capital is an argument of the production function. The simulations suggest that by simply reallocating expenditures from consumption to investment, the govemment can increase the equilibrium leveIs of capital stock, hours worked, output and labor productivity. Funhennore, we 'show that the magnitude and direction of the long run impact of fiscal policy depends on the size of the elasticity of output to public capital. If this parameter is high enough, it may be the case that capital stock, within limits, increases with tax rates.

Vintage capital, distortions and development

This paper asks to what extent distortions to the adoption of new technology cause income inequality across nations. We work in the framework of embodied technological progress with an individual, C.E.S. production function. We estimate the parameters of this production function from international data and calibrate the model, using U.S. National Income statistics. Our analysis suggests that distortions account for a bigger portion of income inequality than hitherto has been assessed.

Three essays on education from the perspective of the economics of public setor

This work consists of three essays organized into chapters that seek to answer questions at first sight unrelated, but with one common denominator, which is the scarcity of public resources devoted to education, overall, especially in lower education. . The first chapter deals with the scarcity of resources devoted to education in a context of population aging. Two hypotheses were tested for Brazilian municipalities on the relationship between the aging of the population and educational expenditure. The first, already proven in the literature, is that there is an intergenerational conflict for resources and the increase of the share of elderly in the population reduces the educational expenditure. The second, proposed here for the first time, is that there should be reduction of competition for resources if there is a relationship of co-residence between young and old. The results indicated that an increase in the share of elderly reduces the educational expenditure per youth. But the results also illustrate that an increase in the share of elderly co-residing with youth (family arrangement more common in Latin American countries) raises the educational expenditure, which reflects a reduction of competition for resources between generations. The second chapter assesses the allocative efficiency of investments in Higher Education. Using the difference between first-year and last-year students’ scores from Enade aggregated by HEI as a product in the Stochastic Production Function, is possible to contribute with a new element in the literature aimed at estimating the production function of education. The results show that characteristics of institutions are the variables that best explain the performance of students, and that public institutions are more inefficient than the private ones. Finally, the third chapter presents evidence that the allocation of public resources in early childhood education is important for a better future school performance. In this chapter was calculated the effects of early childhood education on literacy scores of children attending the 2nd grade of elementary school. The results using OLS and propensity score matching show that students who started school at the ages to 5, 4, and 3 years had literacy scores between 12.22 and 19.54 points higher than the scores of those who began school at the ages 6 years or late. The results also suggest that the returns in terms of literacy scores diminish in relation to the number of years of early childhood education.

On the evolution of TFP in Latin America

Due to several policy distortions, including import-substitution industrialization, widespread government intervention and both domestic and international competitive barriers, there has been a general presumption that Latin America has been much less productive than the leading economies in the last decades. In this paper we show, however, that until the late seventies Latin American countries had high productivity levels relative to the United States. It is only after the late seventies that we observe a fast decrease of relative TFP in Latin America. We also show that the inclusion of human capital in the production function makes a crucial diference in the TFP calculations for Latin America.