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The February issue of the National Westminster Bank's Quarterly Review contains an article by Lynne Evans entitled “The ‘Demographic ‐ Dip’: A Golden Opportunity for Women in the Labour Market?”

This paper tests the extended tax‐smoothing model for a sample of 32 developing countries. Importantly, the testable implications employed relax the assumption of constant money velocity. Although seigniorage is an important source of revenue in developing countries, all the evidence indicates that the principles of optimal taxation have not been used when developing countries raise revenue from inflation.

There is a rich literary tradition of depicting human-dwelling places (usually houses) as living bodies, stretching from the Middle Ages to contemporary fiction. On several occasions, the interaction between the characters in these works and the house-body entity described has taken the form of a digestive journey. Rooms come to symbolise mouths, kitchens and even bowels, and sometimes the human body and mind are gradually incorporated into the external architectural space. This chapter examines two literary works in which this occurs – the ‘House of Temperance’ in Spencer's The Faerie Queene (1590) and Shirley Jackson's novel The Haunting of Hill House (1959). These two examples, from two very different literary traditions (Renaissance allegorical and modern Gothic horror respectively) show the fine line between revelation and horror, how spatial materiality and meaning are flexible and how a building may transform the character within it both psychologically and physically.

The results of a study of long‐term unemployment based on a survey in County Durham are presented. It was found that the long‐term unemployed do not lack motivation to get a job nor impose unreasonable restrictions on, for example, the kind of job they would take or the minimum acceptable pay. There was some evidence that the longer‐duration unemployed tended to be less able in terms of qualifications and were less advantaged in various ways, but the conclusion was that the long‐term unemployed are not unemployable. There is, however, a mismatch problem in that the skill/experience requirements of the current vacancies make them unsuitable for the long‐term unemployed. Experience in County Durham suggests that public sector job creation schemes might offer only limited possibilities for dealing with the problem.

In the literature on development finance, there is a growing interest in the subject of equity participation as a means of promoting development. The limitations of debt finance are increasingly evident at both the micro and macro level, especially given the growth of bad debt as far as business is concerned, and the problem of national indebtedness involving many Third World countries. Borrowing has its uses of course, but inevitably leads to problems if it is used as a means of financing risky ventures or projects which are of a long term nature. In contrast, equity finance means that it is the provider of capital who takes on the risk. The fact that there is flexibility in the pay‐off, which is related to the project being backed, actually serves to reduce risk and enhance the likelihood of successful outcomes.

This paper studies the profit efficiency of a sample of large U.S. commercial banks and explores how this performance varies with selected measures of bank risk reflecting aspects of credit risk, liquidity risk, and insolvency risk. We use a standard profit function and the stochastic frontier approach, and compare two standard functional forms – Cobb‐Douglas and translog – to assess the tradeoff between precision and parsimony. We find that profit efficiency is sensitive to credit risk and insolvency risk but not to liquidity risk or to the mix of loan products.

State capacity for development is decomposed into two broad dimensions, intrinsic and extrinsic. The former concerns the state’s cohesiveness as a strategic actor, which encompasses the ability of the state to formulate and implement policy in a coherent fashion, and the latter is the state’s ability to extract and redistribute resources. Diverging from previous studies, this paper aims to consider how these intrinsic and extrinsic factors interact to increase health cross-nationally.

This study provides a framework for understanding how domestic and international state autonomy in policy decisions improves the effectiveness of health spending at achieving its intended outcomes. Using two-way fixed effects regression models for a sample of 89 low and middle-income nations from 1996-2012, the author tests the claim that health expenditures reduce infant and child mortality more in nations with higher levels of international and domestic autonomy rather than those with lower levels.

The author finds evidence that supports the theoretical perspective that state autonomy in international and domestic policy, through cohesion, legitimacy and local insight, improves the effectiveness of health expenditures at reducing infant and child mortality.

The data only exist for 89 nations and from 1996 to 2012. In addition, the independent variables of interest that measure autonomy are not direct measures but instead indices.

The health and development of a nation’s citizenry largely depends on prioritizing expenditures in health. This research considers under what conditions nations can better prioritize health expenditures.

To provide an in-depth survey and review of innovation in library and information services (LIS) and to identify future trends in innovative research and its practical application in the field.

An in-depth review and summation of relevant literature over the last twenty years, along with an analysis and summary of the other papers in the volume.

Innovation in library and information work varies between the evolutionary and the discontinuous. A taxonomy of innovatory approaches to development and provision in the sector is provided, along with a detailed listing of the key elements of successful and not-so-successful innovative practice.

The work is dependent on existing literature rather than direct empirical work. However, because it draws together all major aspects of the topic, it has the potential to be used as a springboard for further generic studies and also specific programmes of work.

The need for innovation in LIS will be ever more pressing. The present chapter provides a necessary and rigorous overview of the necessary elements required for success in this area. It will be useful as a reference tool for intending researchers in library and information provision in a wide range of environments.

Because the chapter brings together a substantial body of information on the topic of innovation, it provides a comprehensive study of major developments and likely future trends in the field.

The consequences of problematic alcohol consumption fall heavily on Australian adolescents, with this population at increased risk of death, serious injury and other harm. Research regarding whether gender, socioeconomic status (SES) or locality play a role in young people’s alcohol consumption and related harm is limited in Australia. The purpose of this paper is to determine whether Victorian students’ patterns of alcohol uptake, consumption and related harm differed between gender, SES and locality.

The study involved secondary analysis of student data from the Drug Education in Victorian Schools harm minimisation drug education programme, undertaken in 21 Victorian government schools over three years The initial cohort of 1,752 students was followed during Years 8, 9 and 10, when their average age would have, respectively, been 13, 14 and 15 years.

There were no gender differences in drinking uptake, consumption or harm. Students with low SES were more likely to have consumed a full drink of alcohol and also experienced more alcohol-related harm. Students living in a regional/rural area were more likely to have engaged in high alcohol consumption.

The findings of this study highlighted that different student demographics have an impact on patterns of alcohol consumption, vulnerability and harm. Students with low SES, living in a regional/rural area, are more at risk than students with higher SES living in a fringe metro/major regional or metro area. Future school harm minimisation drug education programmes should consider the needs of students with demographics that make them more susceptible to higher consumption and harm.

Data shows that there is an increasing number of young people in the UK needing access to mental health services, including crisis teams. This need has been exacerbated by the current global pandemic. There is mixed evidence for the effectiveness of crisis teams in improving adult functioning, and none, to the authors’ knowledge, that empirically examines the functioning of young people following intervention from child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS) crisis teams in the UK. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to use CAMHS Crisis Team data, from an NHS trust that supports 1.4 million people in the North East of England, to examine a young person's functioning following a crisis.

This service evaluation compared functioning, as measured by the Outcome Rating Scale (ORS), pre- and post-treatment for young people accessing the CAMHS Crisis Team between December 2018 and December 2019.

There were 109 participants included in the analysis. ORS scores were significantly higher at the end of treatment (t(108) = −4.2046, p < 0.001) with a small effect size (d = −0.36). Sixteen (15%) patients exhibited significant and reliable change (i.e. functioning improved). A further four (4%) patients exhibited no change (i.e. functioning did not deteriorate despite being in crisis). No patients significantly deteriorated in functioning after accessing the crisis service.

Despite a possibly overly conservative analysis, 15% of patients not only significantly improved functioning but were able to return to a “healthy” level of functioning after a mental health crisis following intervention from a CAMHS Crisis Team. Intervention(s) from a CAMHS Crisis Team are also stabilising as some young people’s functioning did not deteriorate following a mental health crisis. However, improvements also need to be made to increase the number of patients whose functioning did not significantly improve following intervention from a CAMHS Crisis Team.

This paper evaluates a young person’s functioning following a mental health crisis and intervention from a CAMHS Crisis Team in the North East of England.