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A rapid ageing population coupled with changes in family structure has brought about profound implications to social policy in China. Although the past decade has seen a steady increase in public funding to long-term care (LTC), the narrow financing base and vast population have created significant unmet demand, calling for reforms in financing. This paper focuses on the financing of institutional LTC care by examining new models that have emerged from local policy experiments against two policy goals: equity and efficiency. Three emerging models are explored: Social Health Insurance (SHI) in Shanghai, LTC Nursing Insurance (LTCNI) in Qingdao and a means-tested model in Nanjing. A focused systematic narrative review of academic and grey literature is conducted to identify and assess these models, supplemented with qualitative interviews with government officials from relevant departments, care home staff and service users. This paper argues that, although SHI appears to be a convenient solution to fund LTC, this model has led to systematic bias in affordable access among participants of different insurance schemes, and has created a powerful incentive for the over-provision of unnecessary services. The means-tested method has been remarkably constrained by narrow eligibility and insufficiency of funding resources. The LTCNI model is by far the most desirable policy option among the three studied here, but the narrow definition of eligibility has substantively excluded a large proportion of elders in need from access to care, which needs to be addressed in future reforms. This paper proposes three lines of LTC financing reforms for policy-makers: (1) the establishment of a prepaid financing mechanism pooled specifically for LTC costs; (2) the incorporation of more stringent eligibility rules and needs assessment; and (3) reforming the dominant fee-for-service methods in paying LTC service providers.

This paper investigates the maximal achievable rate for a given blocklength and error probability over quasi-static multiple-input multiple-output fading channels, with and without channel state information at the transmitter and/or the receiver. The principal finding is that outage capacity, despite being an asymptotic quantity, is a sharp proxy for the finite-blocklength fundamental limits of slow-fading channels. Specifically, the channel dispersion is shown to be zero regardless of whether the fading realizations are available at both transmitter and receiver, at only one of them, or at neither of them. These results follow from analytically tractable converse and achievability bounds. Numerical evaluation of these bounds verifies that zero dispersion may indeed imply fast convergence to the outage capacity as the blocklength increases. In the example of a particular 1 × 2 single-input multiple-output Rician fading channel, the blocklength required to achieve 90% of capacity is about an order of magnitude smaller compared with the blocklength required for an AWGN channel with the same capacity. For this specific scenario, the coding/decoding schemes adopted in the LTE-Advanced standard are benchmarked against the finite-blocklength achievability and converse bounds. ; Swedish Research Council (Grant 2012-4571) ; Ericsson Research Foundation (Grant FOSTIFT-12:022) ; European Union (Framework Programme, Marie Curie FP7 Integration Grant 333680) ; Spain (Grant TEC2009-14504-C02-01) ; Spain (Grant CSD2008- 00010) ; Spain (Grant TEC2012-38800-C03-01) ; National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Grant CCF-1253205)

This paper analyzes the channel dispersion of quasi-static multiple-input multiple-output fading channels with no channel state information at the transmitter. We show that the channel dispersion is zero under mild conditions on the fading distribution. The proof of our result is based on Stokes' theorem, which deals with the integration of differential forms on manifolds with boundary. ; Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) (Grant 333680) ; Spanish Government (TEC2009-14504-C02-01) ; Spanish Government (CSD2008-00010) ; Spanish Government (TEC2012-38800-C03-01) ; National Science Foundation (U.S.) (CAREER Award Grant Agreement CCF-1253205)