OBJECTIVE:Physician density is a crucial element of a well-functioning health system. Previous research has investigated factors affecting country-level physician supply. To date, however, no evidence has been provided about the patterns of convergence in physician density among countries. This paper thus tested club convergence in physician density in 204 countries worldwide from 1990 to 2019. A nonlinear time-varying factor model was adopted to identify potential clubs, wherein groups of countries tend to converge towards the same level of physician density. Our primary purpose was to document the potential long-lasting disparity in future global physician distribution. RESULTS:Despite physician density increasing in all regions globally from 1990 to 2019, we found no evidence in favor of the hypothesis of global convergence. Conversely, the clustering algorithm successfully identified three main patterns (i.e., three final clubs). With few exceptions, the results indicated an uneven physician distribution between the majority of North and Sub-Saharan African countries (where physician density would remain well below the estimated threshold of at least 70% of the Universal Health Coverage Services Index) and the rest of the world. These findings support the WHO's global strategy to reverse the chronic under-investment in human resources for health.

In this paper, we applied the concept of convergence to examine the evolution of smoking prevalence among women in 191 countries worldwide from 1990 to 2019. First, the non-linear time-varying factor model proposed by Phillips and Sul was adopted to identify potential clusters (clubs), wherein groups of countries converge to similar female smoking rates. Second, an ordered logit regression model was used to assess the impact of cigarette affordability on the probability of falling within a given cluster. The hypothesis of global convergence was rejected. However, the clustering algorithm successfully identified five and nine clubs, within countries with increasing and decreasing smoking prevalence, respectively. A higher relative income-price ratio (i.e., lower cigarette affordability) increased the likelihood of belonging to a club of countries with a low prevalence of female tobacco smoking.

During the last decades, the share of manufacturing in aggregate output (and employment) has declined in almost all advanced and emerging economies. In this paper, we investigated the patterns of deindustrialization in a sample of 117 (low-, middle-, and high-income) countries from 1995 to 2018. To this aim, we applied the nonlinear time-varying factor model, initially proposed by Phillips and Sul, to identify potential clubs wherein groups of countries converge toward a similar manufacturing share of GDP. Furthermore, we estimated an ordered logit model to assess the impact of economic globalization and technological revolution on the probability of falling into a particular club. Our results did not provide any support for the hypothesis of global convergence. However, the clustering algorithm successfully identified four strong final clubs, where the share of manufacturing on GDP ranges, on average, from 6% to 18%. Finally, the logit model indicated that as the R&D expenditures and the technological content of manufactured goods increased, so did the likelihood of belonging to a club with a high share of manufacturing value-added on GDP.

The impact of soft drinks on obesity has been widely investigated during the last decades. Conversely, the role of obesity as a factor influencing the demand for soft drinks remains largely unexplored. However, understanding potential changes in the demand for soft drinks, as a result of changes in the spread of obesity, may be useful to better design a comprehensive strategy to curb soft drink consumption. In this paper, we aim to answer the following research question: Does the prevalence of obesity affect the demand for soft drinks? For this purpose, we collected data in a sample of 97 countries worldwide for the period 2005–2019. To deal with problems of reverse causality, an instrumental variable approach and a two-stage least squares method were used to estimate the impact of the age-standardized obesity rate on the market demand for soft drinks. After controlling for several demographic and socio-economic confounding factors, we found that a one percent increase in the prevalence of obesity increases the consumption of soft drinks and carbonated soft drinks by about 2.37 and 1.11 L per person/year, respectively. Our findings corroborate the idea that the development of an obesogenic food environment is a self-sustaining process, in which obesity and unhealthy lifestyles reinforce each other, and further support the need for an integrated approach to curb soft drink consumption by combining sugar taxes with bans, regulations, and nutrition education programs.

During the last decades, the share of manufacturing in aggregate output (and employment) has declined in almost all advanced and emerging economies. In this paper, we investigated the patterns of deindustrialization in a sample of 117 (low-, middle-, and high-income) countries from 1995 to 2018. To this aim, we applied the nonlinear time-varying factor model, initially proposed by Phillips and Sul, to identify potential clubs wherein groups of countries converge toward a similar manufacturing share of GDP. Furthermore, we estimated an ordered logit model to assess the impact of economic globalization and technological revolution on the probability of falling into a particular club. Our results did not provide any support for the hypothesis of global convergence. However, the clustering algorithm successfully identified four strong final clubs, where the share of manufacturing on GDP ranges, on average, from 6% to 18%. Finally, the logit model indicated that as the R&D expenditures and the technological content of manufactured goods increased, so did the likelihood of belonging to a club with a high share of manufacturing value-added on GDP.

BACKGROUND:A key component of 'obesogenic environments' is the ready availability of convenient, calorie-dense foods, in the form of hyper-palatable and relatively inexpensive ultra-processed products. Compelling evidence indicates that the regular consumption of soft drinks, specifically carbonated and non-carbonated sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs), has a significant impact on the prevalence of overweight and obesity. However, to implement country-level effective prevention programmes we need to supplement this evidence with quantitative knowledge of the relationships between overweight/obesity and the main determinants of SSB consumption, notably SSB prices and consumers' disposable income.METHOD:Affordability considers the simultaneous effects of both price and disposable income on the buying decision. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of SSB affordability on the consumers' purchasing behaviour and weight-related health outcomes. Our study was divided into three parts. First, we computed SSB consumption and affordability for approximately 150 countries worldwide. Second, we estimated a demand function for SSBs to assess the impact of affordability on consumption at the country level. Third, we used a multivariate regression model and country data on the prevalence of overweight and obesity to test the role of SSB affordability in the current obesity epidemic.RESULTS:The analysis reveals that SSB affordability: 1) showed both a large variability across countries and a clear tendency to increase substantially with the level of economic development; 2) played a key role in determining cross-country differences in the amount of soft drink consumed per capita; and 3) was significantly associated with the prevalence rates of both overweight and obesity. Specifically, we show that a 10 % increase in SSB affordability was associated, on average, with approximately 0.4 more overweight/obese adults per 100 inhabitants.CONCLUSIONS:By controlling for the main possible confounding factors, our results clearly indicate that affordability is a major driver of purchasing behaviours and is significantly associated with the prevalence rates of both overweight and obesity. We thus suggest a fiscal approach to curb SSB consumption based on the effectiveness of 'soda taxes' to affect the long-term dynamic of SSB affordability.

Nowadays, obesity and being overweight are among the major global health concerns. Many, diet-related diseases impose high tangible and intangible costs, and threaten the sustainability of health-care systems worldwide. In this study, we model, at the macroeconomic level, the impact of energy intake from different types of carbohydrates on the population’s BMI (body mass index). We proceed in three steps. First, we develop a framework to analyse both the consumption choices between simple and complex carbohydrates and the effects of these choices on people health conditions. Second, we collect figures for 185 countries (over the period 2012–2014) regarding the shares of simple (sugar and sweetener) and complex (cereal) carbohydrates in each country’s total dietary energy supply. Third, we use regression techniques to: (1) estimate the impact of these shares on the country’s prevalence of obesity and being overweight; (2) compute for each country an indicator of dietary pattern based on the ratio between simple and complex carbohydrates, weighted by their estimated effects on the prevalence of obesity and being overweight; and (3) measure the elasticity of the prevalence of obesity and being overweight with respect to changes in both carbohydrate dietary pattern and income per capita. We find that unhealthy eating habits and the associated prevalence of excessive body fat accumulation tend to behave as a ‘normal good’ in low, medium- and high-HDI (Human Development Index) countries, but as an ‘inferior good’ in very high-HDI countries.

Measuring gender inequality and women’s empowerment is essential to understand the determinants of gender gaps, evaluate policies and monitor countries’ progress. With this aim, over the past two decades, research has mainly been directed towards the development of composite indices. The purpose of this paper is to introduce a new and interdisciplinary perspective to the current debate on measuring gender inequality in human development. As a starting point, we develop a simple macroeconomic model of the interdependence between human development and gender inequality. We then introduce a biometric indicator, based on the ratio of female to male body mass index, to measure women’s empowerment at the country level. Finally, by using the latest available data, we examine the ability of this biometric indicator to capture countries’ performance in achieving gender equality. We obtain five main results: 1) we provide a theoretical framework to explain the joint determination of human development and gender inequality; 2) we show how to use this framework to simulate the impact of exogenous shocks or policy changes; 3) we demonstrate that exogenous changes have a direct and a multiplier effect on human development and gender inequality; 4) we find that the distribution of obesity between the female and male populations represents a useful proxy variable for measuring gender equality at the country level; 5) finally, we use these results to integrate and develop existing knowledge on the ‘ecological’ approach to the overweight and obesity pandemic.

Using data from a field survey of airport employees across European airports, we identify how trust in security technology affects the implementation of security rules and regulations. An analysis of respondents from eight airports in Europe demonstrated that compliance with security rules and protocols was related to two main categories of trust in technology: one oriented to the technology itself and the other to technology as a means of catching offenders. A further multivariate analysis showed that security decisions by each ‘trusting’ group tended to reflect its degree of commitment to the organizations' administrative guidelines and the organizations' security attitude.

Security decisions in high risk organizations such as airports involve obtaining ongoing and frequent information about potential threats. Utilizing questionnaire survey data from a sample of airport employees in European Airports across the continent, we analyzed how both formal and informal sources of security information affect employee’s decisions to comply with the security rules and directives. This led us to trace information network flows to assess its impact on the degree employees making security decisions comply or deviate with the prescribed security rules. The results of the multivariate analysis showed that security information obtained through formal and informal networks differentially determine if employees will comply or not with the rules. Information sources emanating from the informal network tends to encourage employees to be more flexible in their security decisions while formal sources lead them to be more rigid with complying with rules and protocols. These results suggest that alongside the formal administrative structure of airports, there exists a diverse and pervasiveness set of informal communications networks that are a potent factor in determining airport security levels.

Recent evidence has shown that airport security decisions frequently fail to follow rules and procedures. Investigating this phenomenon through an analysis of data garnered from ethnographic and field surveys of European airports suggests that propensity to bend or ignore the rules can be associated with three distinct airport employee types, namely the ‘adaptive’, ‘social interactive’ and ‘compliant bureaucratic’. Each employee security profile is characterised in terms of the degree of rule compliance. ‘Adaptive’ employees are likely to bend rules. ‘Social interactive’ rely primarily on group decision making, and ‘compliant bureaucratic’ are allied with the administrative and security regulations. These findings should alert security officials to the possibility of leveraging such employee profiles in terms of human resource recruitment and physical distribution within the airport organisation to take advantage of specific requirements in the operation of the airport.

Two experiments were conducted to investigate whether physical and observational practice in task-sharing entail comparable implicit motor learning. To this end, the social-transfer-of-learning (SToL) effect was assessed when both participants performed the joint practice task (Experiment 1--complete task-sharing), or when one participant observed the other performing half of the practice task (Experiment 2--evocative task-sharing). Since the inversion of the spatial relations between responding agent and stimulus position has been shown to prevent SToL, in the present study we assessed it in both complete and evocative task-sharing conditions either when spatial relations were kept constant or changed from the practice to the transfer session. The same pattern of results was found for both complete and evocative task-sharing, thus suggesting that implicit motor learning in evocative task-sharing is equivalent to that obtained in complete task-sharing. We conclude that this motor learning originates from the simulation of the complementary (rather than the imitative) action.

This paper employs a behavioral science perspective of airport security to, examine security related decision behaviors using exploratory ethnographic observations. Sampling employees from a broad spectrum of departments and occupations in several major airports across Europe, over 700 descriptive items are transcribed into story scripts that are analyzed. The results demonstrate that both formal and informal behavioral factors are present when security decisions are made. The repetitive patterns of behavior allowed us to develop a generic model applicable to a wide range of security related situations. What the descriptions suggest is that even within the formal regulatory administrative framework of airports, actual real-time security behaviors may deviate from rules and regulations to adapt to local situations.

Two experiments were conducted to assess whether the joint Simon effect is composed of facilitation and interference and whether facilitation is increased by a joint spatially compatible practice performed before performing the joint Simon task. In both experiments, participants were required to perform a Simon task along another person. Trials could be corresponding, non-corresponding, and neutral. In Experiment 1, participants performed only the Simon task. In Experiment 2, participants first practiced on a joint spatial compatibility task with a compatible mapping and, after a 5-min delay, transferred to a joint Simon task. Results indicated that the joint Simon effect consisted primarily of interference, which was significantly increased by a spatially compatible practice performed jointly. These results allow us to better define in what ways the presence of the other influences performance, in showing that when participants perform a task along with another individual, they display a disadvantage (i.e., slower RTs) when they have to respond to stimuli appearing on the other agent's side.