Suchergebnisse

A key feature of antitrust today is that the law is developed entirely through adjudication. Evidence suggests that this exclusive reliance on adjudication has failed to deliver a predictable, efficient, or participatory antitrust regime. Antitrust litigation and enforcement are protracted and expensive, requiring extensive discovery and costly expert analysis. In theory, this approach facilitates nuanced and fact-specific analysis of liability and well-tailored remedies. But in practice, the exclusive reliance on case-by-case adjudication has yielded a system of enforcement that generates ambiguity, drains resources, privileges incumbents, and deprives individuals and firms of any real opportunity to participate in the process of creating substantive antitrust rules. It is difficult to quantify this harm. This Essay argues that rulemaking under § 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act should supplement antitrust adjudication, and that this institutional shift would lower enforcement costs, reduce ambiguity, and facilitate greater democratic participation. We build on existing scholarship to debunk the view that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) does not have competition rulemaking authority pursuant to the Administrative Procedure Act conferring Chevron deference, and trace legislative history to underscore how Congress designed the FTC to play a unique institutional role. We close by outlining an initial set of factors that should weigh in favor of rulemaking: when there is significant learning from past enforcement and when private litigation would be unlikely. Finally, we pose questions in the context of the FTC's recent hearings to prompt further discussion on where this unused tool would be most useful.

Radon is a known carcinogen found in indoor air that exists at higher than the federal reference level (200 Bq/m3) in about 10% of Canadian homes. Every year, over 3,000 people die from radon-induced lung cancer, which accounts for 16% of annual lung cancer deaths in Canada. Radon is the leading cause of lung cancer deaths among non-smokers and is second among smokers. Children, women, and smokers from lower income groups are disproportionately affected. Although the Federal Government has reset the guideline (from the previous 600 Bq/m3 down to 200 Bq/m3) and provincial governments revised the building codes to limit exposure, there remain controversies with the latest scientific development in adopting strategies of radon management in Canada. This review applies an Integrated Population Health Framework to look at the relationships and interactions between population health determinants such as biology and genetics, environment and occupation, and social and economic factors, that influence the health risk of radon. The evidence gathered supports policy analysis with the application of ethical and risk management principles that lead to the identification of efficient and affordable broad-based and population-level preventive strategies. The final inferences enhance the framework by adding critical intervention modalities to Health Canada's National Radon Program. ; Le radon est un cancérigène qui se retrouve dans l'air intérieur et qui existe en quantités supérieures au niveau de référence du gouvernement fédéral (200 Bq/m3) dans environ dix pour cent des foyers canadiens. Le cancer du poumon provoqué par le radon tue plus de 3 000 personnes chaque année, ce qui représente 16 pour cent des décès annuels causés par le cancer du poumon au Canada. Le radon est la cause principale des décès attribués au cancer du poumon chez les non-fumeurs et la deuxième chez les fumeurs. Les enfants, les femmes et les fumeurs issus de groupes à faible revenu sont touchés de façon disproportionnée. Bien que le gouvernement fédéral ait réajusté le niveau de référence de 600 Bq/m3 à 200 Bq/m3 et que les gouvernements provinciaux aient révisé les codes de construction pour limiter l'exposition, les dernières avancées scientifiques pour adopter des stratégies de gestion du radon au Canada demeurent controversées. Cette analyse se sert d'une approche intégrée axée sur la santé de la population pour examiner les relations et les interactions entre les déterminants de la santé de la population, tels que la biologie, la génétique, l'environnement, la profession, et les facteurs socioéconomiques qui influencent le risque du radon pour la santé. Les données recueillies et les politiques analysées en appliquant les principes éthiques et les principes de la gestion des risques ont mené à l'identification de stratégies de prévention efficaces, abordables à grande échelle et au ni-veau de la population. Les conclusions servent à améliorer la santé de la population en proposant des modalités d'intervention cruciales pour le Programme national sur le radon de Santé Canada.

In recent years, economic inequality has become a central topic of public debate in the United States and much of the developed world. The popularity of Thomas Piketty's nearly 700-page tome, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, is a testament to this newfound focus on economic disparity. As top intellectuals, politicians, and public figures have come to recognize inequality as a major problem that must be addressed, they have offered a range of potential solutions. Frequently mentioned proposals include reforming the tax system, strengthening organized labor, revising international trade and investment agreements, and reducing the size of the financial sector. One underexplored theme in this larger debate is the role of monopoly and oligopoly power. Given the current distribution of business ownership assets in the United States, market power can be a powerful mechanism for transferring wealth from the many among the working and middle classes to the few belonging to the 1% and 0.1% at the top of the income and wealth distribution. In concrete terms, monopoly pricing on goods and services turns the disposable income of the many into capital gains, dividends, and executive compensation for the few. Evidence across a number of key industries in the United States indicates that excessive market power is a serious problem. Firms in industries ranging from agriculture to airlines collude, merge and exclude rivals, and raise consumer prices above competitive levels, while pushing prices below competitive levels for suppliers. The aggregate wealth transfer effect from pervasive monopoly and oligopoly power is likely, at a minimum, hundreds of billions of dollars per year.

Skilled birth attendance (SBA) is a key health intervention used by roughly two-thirds of women in Ghana. The National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) provided by the Government of Ghana is widely expected to improve maternal health outcomes by removing financial barriers to health services. Using data from the 2011 national Ghana Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey implemented by the Ghana Statistical Services and UNICEF, we examine the effect of insurance on SBA using a multivariate logistic model, controlling for a number of enabling and predisposing factors and past experience with the health system. Our sample is 2 528 women who had a birth in the two years before the survey. Our results show that women with health insurance are 74% more likely to use SBA than women without health insurance. Results also underscore that health insurance, while it eliminates a monetary barrier, does not solve health services availability problems and widespread geographic disparities in coverage of SBA persist. Additionally, we find that higher parity women and poor women are much less likely to use SBA and should be the focus of health interventions in order to fulfil development goals. Health insurance may indeed be a useful mechanism to improve coverage of SBA though further work to understand the effect of health insurance on other maternal outcomes is warranted.

The goal of this Article is to create a way of seeing how market structure is innately political. It provides a taxonomy of ways in which large companies frequently exercise powers that possess the character of governance. Broadly, these exercises of power map onto three bodies of activity we generally assign to government: to set policy, to regulate markets, and to tax. We add a fourth category – which we call "dominance," after Brandeis – as a kind of catchall describing the other political impacts. The activities we outline will not always fit neatly into these categories, nor do all companies engage in all of these levels of power – that is not the point. The point is that Bank of America and Exxon govern our lives in a way that, say, the local ice cream store in your hometown does not. Explicitly understanding the power these companies wield as a form of political power expands the range of legal tools we should consider when setting policy around them.

Jurisdictional ownership of all natural resources, including wetlands and river channels, belongs to the state in Bangladesh, and access to and control over wetland resource are determined by the existing top-down, command-and-control, bureaucratic management regimes. Grounded solely in the economic aspects of natural resources, the wetland management objective of the government focuses on rent-seeking to maximize revenues and other economic benefits. At the operational level, this approach presumes bounded and closed economic and social systems and an equilibrial environment. The purpose of this research was to investigate options for institutionalizing participation of stakeholders in wetland (haor) resource management. It was intended to seek alternatives to the state-governed management approach (SMA) and find a means of governance that would encompass multi-stakeholders in the management of natural resources. The specific objectives of this research were to: i) Examine the state-governed management approach and the relationship between formal and informal institutions concerned with access and control over wetland (haor) resources; ii) Analyze, as an alternative to SMA, the processes and structures of stakeholders' participation and deliberations in decision-making; and iii) Examine the potential for multi-stakeholder governance in wetland resource management. This research selected three development initiatives in Hakaluki haor (major wetland of Bangladesh) for assessment. A set of PRA methods, which included baseline surveys, focus group discussions, key informant interviews, semi-structured interviews, individual discussion meetings, addah (informal chatting with friends and fellows), and workshops, was used during the research to attain the objective of the study. The research findings have revealed that the community-based organizations (CBOs) were capable of contributing effectively to the community-based or co-management approach in wetland resource management. Establishing a multi-level stakeholder ...

The social, cultural, religious and psychological fibres of India are predominantly patriarchal contributing extensively to the secondary status of women. A popular stereotype is strong preference of a male child. The deficit of women in India's population has been documented ever since the first decennial enumeration of people was conducted in the British-occupied parts of India in the late 19th century. Over the span of more than 100 years, the deficit of women has progressively increased as evident from the sex ratio of the population; the number of women per 1000 men more or less steadily declined from 972 in 1901 to 933 in 2001, The explanation for India's low sex ratio are the trends of increasing masculinization and discrimination against woman. Sex selective abortion is a matter of great concern. The social and demographic implications of sex selective abortions are grave. In much of South Asia, sons are preferred over daughters for a number of reasons such as economic, social and religious reasons including financial support, old age security, property inheritance, dowry, family lineage, prestige and power, birth and death rituals and beliefs about religious duties and salvation. There are several forces associated with female foeticide which need research. The present study on 217 subjects in equal number of males and females drawn from the population using the simple random technique was completed in Delhi in the age group of 15-40 years. There are some salient findings such as: (1) The role of family planning and the fear of not being able to earn the resources seem to play relatively a greater role than the common belief about the son preference. This finding needs further research to find out the relative position of known factors contributing to the growing issue of sex selecting abortion; (2) The detection of the sex of the foetus and illegal abortion (Sex Selective Abortion), are placed as two steps. It is not necessary that all going for sex detection would opt for illegal abortion but there is probability of a very close relation rather than a linear relationship between sex detection and illegal abortion. The distancebetween the two can be broadened if close monitoring and strict regulationof abortion law is carried out in the country with a strong partnership with the influencing people in the society; and (3) Socially sensitive measures seem to be more important than the legal measures. One alsogets the impression from the findings that the explanations broadly quoted in the literature to explain the issues of declining child sex ratio are narrow and biased. Many of them are based on assumptions and a general theoretical framework to explain the gender discrimination. Findings in this table provide a valuable contribution to the issue of child sex ratio, which of course need to be studied further on the largest sample using scientifically developed measures/tools/techniques.

Abstract. Suicidal behavior includes ideation, attempts and completed suicides. Information on suicidal behavior from Pakistan, a conservative South Asian Islamic country, is lacking. To address the issue, a pilot study was carried out to assess the prevalence of suicidal ideation in Pakistani college students. Suicidal ideation was assessed on the basis of responses to four questions contained in the depression subscale of the General Health Questionnaire-28. Of the total 217 completed questionnaires, the overall rate of suicidal ideation was 31.4%. While there was no significant difference between genders, more females (33%) than males (29.2%) responded positively. Respondents belonging to single parent families and those living at home, compared to those using hostel facilities, reported higher rates. The reported rate in our sample is higher than similar studies conducted elsewhere. There is the need for more information in this important area of suicidal behavior, including studying such feelings in school going children as well as in a larger community sample. The findings of such studies can contribute to our understanding of the suicidal process in the Pakistani population and to address it at various levels.