William Foley and Klarita Gërxhani
This paper establishes an association between income and the likelihood of seeking medical treatment for Covid-19 symptoms in some countries. We provide an explanation for this…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper establishes an association between income and the likelihood of seeking medical treatment for Covid-19 symptoms in some countries. We provide an explanation for this income effect based on the stringency of government response to the pandemic and the unequal distribution of agency among social classes.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper makes use of data from the Six-Country Survey on Covid-19 to establish the existence of an income effect on health utilisation, and from the Oxford Covid-19 Government response tracker to show that this income effect is associated with the stringency of governmental response to the pandemic. Data from the 2011/12 “Health and Healthcare” round of the International Social Survey Programme is used to show that this income effect cannot be explained by pre-existing patterns. An explanation for the link between government stringency and the income effect is advanced on a theoretical basis.
Findings
The authors find in Britain, the US, and – with greater uncertainty – in Japan that individuals who experience potential Covid-19 symptoms are less likely to seek medical treatment if they have a lower income. The authors also show that governments in these countries adopted a less stringent response to the pandemic than the countries in our sample which do not exhibit an income effect – China, Italy and South Korea. The authors argue that laissez-faire policies place the burden of action upon the individual, activating underlying differences in agency between the social classes, and making (high) low-income individuals (more) less likely to seek medical attention.
Research limitations/implications
Since there was not a direct measure of agency in the data, it could not be empirically verified that agency mediates the effect of government stringency on health utilisation. Further research could make use of datasets which incorporate such a measure, if they become available. It could also extend the geographical scope of the findings, to see if the income effect manifests in other countries which adopted a laissez-faire response to the pandemic.
Practical implications
Governments should intervene more stringently during pandemics to minimise inequality in health outcomes.
Originality/value
This paper establishes an association between the stringency of government response to the Covid-19 pandemic and income inequality in health utilisation. This contributes to scholarly and policy debates around health inequality in the area of social epidemiology, and the sociology of inequality more generally. It is also of relevance to the general public, in the context of a deadly pandemic.
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Ivana Adamson and H.R. Seddighi
This study provides an analysis of two regional samples on R&D activities in manufacturing small and medium‐size firms in the UK. The results show that there are statistically…
Abstract
This study provides an analysis of two regional samples on R&D activities in manufacturing small and medium‐size firms in the UK. The results show that there are statistically significant regional differences between the North East and the West Midlands (χr2 of 11.8 s.s. at p < .01), where the North East SMEs seem to engage less in R&D activities. The results may be of some interest to the relevant R&D funding bodies.
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David C. Carlson and Paul McDevitt
This paper examines the theory and practice of promotional budgeting. Part 1 contains a brief review of the literature in this important area. Part 2 presents the theoretical…
Abstract
This paper examines the theory and practice of promotional budgeting. Part 1 contains a brief review of the literature in this important area. Part 2 presents the theoretical underpinnings of the promotional budgeting decision and introduces a conceptual model for illustrating these. In the next section this model is used to identify desirable budgeting strategies for different sets of market circumstances. Part 4 describes several problems which practitioners confront in determining optimum promotional outlays. Finally, Part 5 identifies the most frequent methods that are used to set promotional budgets.
Butt can be placed within the framework of what George Boyce (1995, pp. 18–19) terms colonial patriotism. Butt's analyses of Ireland's economy and development during the next…
Abstract
Butt can be placed within the framework of what George Boyce (1995, pp. 18–19) terms colonial patriotism. Butt's analyses of Ireland's economy and development during the next years brought together the several strands that marked out an Ireland of citizens, an Ireland of sort which has emerged at the turn of the present millennium. What were the influences on Butt and what is his place in the development of political economy? His position is best characterised as eclectic and distinct from the other early holders of the Whately Chair. Drawing upon but not endorsing classical political economy, Adam Smith, Longfield, Jean-Baptiste Say and others, Butt defies pigeonholing. His economic analysis emerged slowly, and initially, there was little hint that he would expand on Longfield's position which essentially was a theory of profit (McGovern, 2000, p. 5). However, Butt moved beyond Longfield's analysis and whereas the latter remained in the classical tradition on free trade, he did not. He expanded Longfield's approach that crucial to the determination of the price of goods was the importance of applying a unit of whatever resource to its marginal use, concluding that the factors of production were remunerated in relation to the utility they created in their least efficient, marginal employment (Boylan & Foley, 2003, Vol. 2, p. 10). His importance, it has been observed, was in drawing attention to the potential resource mobilisation and distribution aspects of protection and in assessing the benefits and weaknesses of protection in relation to the complexity of specific circumstances (Boylan and Foley, 2003, Vol. 3, p. 5). Butt's Whatley lectures have received most attention although it will be suggested that certain of his other writings were as important or even more significant as indicative of his ideas on political economy. In his first Whatley lecture (Butt, 1837a), appropriating the title ‘Introduction’, Butt outlined somewhat verbosely the scope of what he intended to address and adopted the high ground about the purpose of political economy. He declared it was ‘to teach certain truths connected with the social condition of man – it attempts to explain the nature of the causes by which is brought about that singular machinery of society by which Providence has set man to supply each other's wants, and thus receive and confer a mutual benefit’ (1837a, p. 23). Butt addressed the question of production and the creation of ‘utility’. Employing the illustration of cotton stockings, Butt demonstrated the complex interchange required to produce even the most mundane of articles (1837a, pp. 25–26). ‘When you purchase your pair of cotton stockings’, he noted, ‘you are positively commanding for your own personal comfort and accommodation, not only the services of thousands of your cotemporary fellow creatures, but the accumulated results of the labours of generations that have long since passed away’ (1837a, p. 28). Thus, he maintained, political economy ‘teaches the laws which regulate the production, distribution and consumption of wealth’ (1837a, p. 30).
WE are pleased to devote this Special Number of THE LIBRARY WORLD to a discussion of Irish libraries and librarianship. Our contributors are all distinguished members of the…
Abstract
WE are pleased to devote this Special Number of THE LIBRARY WORLD to a discussion of Irish libraries and librarianship. Our contributors are all distinguished members of the profession in Ireland, none more so than Dermot Foley, to whom we are greatly indebted for having convened this issue.
Diagrams are ubiquitous in economics and are uncontestably among the most used, if not the most important workhorses of economists, though they come in many forms. This essay…
Abstract
Diagrams are ubiquitous in economics and are uncontestably among the most used, if not the most important workhorses of economists, though they come in many forms. This essay examines the different uses of graphs and diagrams in the pioneering work of two Victorian economists, Stanley Jevons and Alfred Marshall. We stress the difference between their use as representations and as visual reasoning tools, a difference that became obscured in the twentieth century with the rise of econometrics.
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Charles Geisler and Ben Currens
Recreancy is a concept that received William R. Freudenburg’s studied attention. Freudenburg moved beyond its conventional meaning – shirking duty – to a larger realm of…
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Recreancy is a concept that received William R. Freudenburg’s studied attention. Freudenburg moved beyond its conventional meaning – shirking duty – to a larger realm of irresponsibility by public actors who breach a societal trust they assume. This research focuses on the issue of “Peak Farmland,” a rendering of global carrying capacity that, we suggest, qualifies for what Freudenburg called “privileged discourse” and possibly recreancy. Scholars identified with dematerialized progress argue that finite farmland in the face of increasing population will improve human welfare and spare land for nature. This iconoclasm presents an arena for testing academic probity with respect to global food security. After an overview of past carrying capacity debates, we summarize the “Peak Farmland” position of the dematerialization school and suggest an important blind spot: the dematerialization of the global land base itself. Gathering the results of multiple studies on land loss, we offer evidence that the world’s warehouse of productive land is not just peaking but eroding on a grand scale. Ignoring this form of dematerialization while proclaiming nearly unlimited carrying capacity for Earth’s denizens strains the meaning of responsible scholarship.
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This chapter documents how eugenics, scientific racism, and hereditarianism survived at Harvard well into the interwar years. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Thomas Nixon…
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This chapter documents how eugenics, scientific racism, and hereditarianism survived at Harvard well into the interwar years. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Thomas Nixon Carver and Frank W. Taussig published works in which they established a close nexus between an individual’s economic position and his biological fitness. Carver, writing in 1929, argued that social class rigidities are attributable to the inheritance of superior and inferior abilities on the respective social class levels and proposed an “economic test of fitness” as a eugenic criterion to distinguish worthy from unworthy individuals. In 1932, Taussig, together with Carl Smith Joslyn, published American Business Leaders – a study that showed how groups with superior social status are proportionately much more productive of professional and business leaders than are the groups with inferior social status. Like Carver, Taussig and Joslyn attributed this circumstance primarily to hereditary rather than environmental factors. Taussig, Joslyn, and Carver are not the only protagonists of our story. The Russian-born sociologists Pitirim Alexandrovich Sorokin, who joined the newly established Department of Sociology at Harvard in 1930, also played a crucial role. His book Social Mobility (1927) exercised a major influence on both Taussig and Carver and contributed decisively to the survival of eugenic and hereditarian ideas at Harvard in the 1930s.
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This paper examines the corporate policies on workplace relationships in the insurance industry. It consists of identifying whether the 48 insurance companies found in the Fortune…
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This paper examines the corporate policies on workplace relationships in the insurance industry. It consists of identifying whether the 48 insurance companies found in the Fortune 500 have any policies that restrict employees from dating each other within their organization and if so, what were these restrictions. In addition, 235 employees in the insurance field were surveyed to determine their perceptions of the positive and/or negative effects of romantic relationships had in their workplace environment. These results were examined from a Platonic perspective with a recommendation for a code of ethics developed from policies existing in other insurance companies and suggested by the current literature.
Tom Schultheiss and Linda Mark
The following classified, annotated list of titles is intended to provide reference librarians with a current checklist of new reference books, and is designed to supplement the…
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The following classified, annotated list of titles is intended to provide reference librarians with a current checklist of new reference books, and is designed to supplement the RSR review column, “Recent Reference Books,” by Frances Neel Cheney. “Reference Books in Print” includes all additional books received prior to the inclusion deadline established for this issue. Appearance in this column does not preclude a later review in RSR. Publishers are urged to send a copy of all new reference books directly to RSR as soon as published, for immediate listing in “Reference Books in Print.” Reference books with imprints older than two years will not be included (with the exception of current reprints or older books newly acquired for distribution by another publisher). The column shall also occasionally include library science or other library related publications of other than a reference character.