Suchergebnisse

Purpose of this report is the identification and analysis of the regulatory and ethical framework relevant to the SPHINX project. Its findings need therefore to be taken into account by all project partners while executing their tasks. SPHINX aims to introduce a universal cyber security toolkit that will enhance the cyber protection of Health IT Ecosystems and ensure patients' data privacy and integrity. The SPHINX toolkit will be adapted or embedded on existing medical, clinical or health available infrastructures. In the context of the project, SPHINX's cyber-security ecosystem shall be validated and evaluated against performance, effectiveness and usability indicators at three different countries (Romania, Portugal and Greece). Hospitals, healthcare providers and IT solution providers participating in the project's pilots will deploy and evaluate the solution at business-as-usual and emergency situations across various use case scenarios. This report takes into account the SPHINX project characteristics and particularises them onto legal and ethical findings. Its first three parts elaborate upon the applicable legal and ethical framework for SPHINX project purposes. In this context, the ethical principles applicable are discussed in Chapter 1, while EU personal data protection law and EU cybersecurity law are analysed in Chapters 2 and 3 respectively. The analysis takes into account primary and secondary legislation, as well as, guidance issued by the European Commission and other EU bodies and agencies. Its aim is to formulate a comprehensive text of reference for all ethical and legal issues that are of relevance to the project. Findings of the first three Chapters of this report are made concrete onto actual SPHINX circumstances in Chapter 4. While structurally the already applied pattern is followed in this Chapter as well (subchapters 4.3, 4.4 and 4.5 focusing on ethical, personal data protection, and cybersecurity issues respectively), attention has been given to drafting concrete and specific guidance ...

The debate over work requirements for social programs is hot and heavy. I'll chime in there as I don't think even the Wall Street Journal Editorial pages have stated the issue clearly from an economic point of view.  As usual, it's getting obfuscated in a moral cloud by both sides: How could you be so heartless as to force unfortunate people to work, vs. how immoral it is to subsidize indolence, and value of the "culture" of self-sufficiency. Economics, as usual, offers a straightforward value-free way to think about the issue: Incentives. When you put all our social programs together, low income Americans face roughly 100% marginal tax rates. Earn an extra dollar, lose a dollar of benefits. It's not that simple, of course, with multiple cliffs of infinite tax rates (earn an extra cent, lose a program entirely), and depends on how many and which programs people sign up for. But the order of magnitude is right. The incentive effect is clear: don't work (legally). As Phil Gramm and Mike Solon report, Since 1967, average inflation-adjusted transfer payments to low-income households—the bottom 20%—have grown from $9,677 to $45,389. During that same period, the percentage of prime working-age adults in the bottom 20% of income earners who actually worked collapsed from 68% to 36%.36%. The latter number is my main point, we'll get to cost later. Similarly, the WSJ points to  a report by Jonathan Bain and Jonathan Ingram at the Foundation for Government Accountability thatthere are four million able-bodied adults without dependents on food stamps, and three in four don't work at all. Less than 3% work full-time.3%. Incentives are a budget constraint to government policy, hard and immutable. Your feelings about people one way or another do not move the incentives at all. A gift of money with an income phase-out leads people to work less, and to require more gifts of money.  That's just a fact. What to do? One answer is, remove the income phaseouts. Give food stamps, medicaid, housing subsidies,  earned income tax credits, and so forth, to everyone, and don't reduce them with income. Then the disincentive to work is much reduced. (There is still the "income effect," but in my judgement that's a lot smaller for most people in this category.) Rather obviously, that's impractical. Even the US, even if r<g or MMT are true, would run out of money quickly. That's the problem with Universal Basic Income. Even $20,000 x 331 million = $6.6 trillion, essentially the entire federal budget right there, and $20,000 of total support is a lot less than people with $0 income get right now. (Gramm, Ekelund and Early, and Casey Mulligan estimate about $60,000 is the right number here.)  Put another way, to eliminate the work disincentive in the social programs, we would have to jack up marginal tax rates on everyone to such stratospheric levels that nobody works. You can't escape disincentives. So, support for the unfortunate must be limited somehow. That's why we limit it to people below a certain income level. But even if each individual program maintains a reasonable marginal phaseout, they add up across programs, and next thing you know we're back to 100% phase out. Posit that work is still desirable,  to earn some money, to contribute to your fellow citizens, to reduce the need for income assistance, and to build human capital.  (Plus the more ephemeral goals all sides of the debate ascribe to work -- self reliance, life meaning, self-respect, participation in society, and so forth. I promised no moral or sociological arguments, but these values being shared by both sides of the debate, I can make a little exception. Nobody thinks that an entire lifetime of living on a government check, doing nothing but drink take drugs and play video games all day, makes for a desirable society, no matter who they vote for.)  If so, if the social safety net creates a 100% marginal tax rate on work, and if abandoning income phaseouts will bankrupt the state, then we have a problem. Work requirements are an imperfect method to try to replace the incentive to work that social programs eliminate. Our government does this sort of thing all over to transfer income but contain the disincentives: Subsidize gas, and then regulate against its use for example. It is inefficient, as you can tell from the brouhaha. It's much more efficient to get people to work by saying "if you earn a dollar, you can keep it," rather than "if you earn a dollar we'll take it away from you but we're going to force you to work." As the WSJ details here and often, the rules are complex, and people and governments game them. Just who should work? Progressives will quickly find a sick single mother taking care of elderly parents and commuting to some horrible fast food job who falls through the cracks, and they are right. Rules and bureaucracies are very rough substitutes for market incentives. More importantly, if you're working for money, you find the best job you can, you work hard, you look for better opportunities. If you're working to satisfy a bureaucratic work requirement in the face of a 100% tax rate, you find the easiest job you can, you don't care about the money and thereby the social productivity of the work, and you do as little as possible. So I'm not defending work requirements as a perfect offset to a 100% marginal tax rate. But they are there for a reason, as a very rough offset to some of the huge disincentives that means-tested programs pose. The point today is that we should start to understand and debate work requirements in this framework. If you're going to remove market incentives, you need some replacement. By the way, supposedly socialist Europe, after its experience with "the dole" in the early 1990s, is much more heard-hearted about these sorts of incentives than we are. Progressives who think we should both emulate nordic countries and also expand our safety net should go look at nordic countries. Is there a better way? I've long played with the idea of limiting help by time rather than by income. That's how unemployment insurance works. We understand that replacing people's paycheck forever if they lose their job has bad incentive effects. Unemployment is understood as a temporary misfortune, and understanding the incentives, you get unemployment checks for a limited amount of time. Could not many other programs aimed at misfortune also be limited by time -- but then allow you to keep each extra dollar of earnings? Perhaps even unemployment should be a fixed amount of time, and you can keep receiving it for the full (normally) 26 weeks even if you get a job. The trouble with that, of course, is that some people will not get their acts together in the required time, and then you have to be heartless. But is it not just as heartless to say to a person who had been on food stamps, earned income tax credit, social security disability and housing voucher, "well, congrats on getting  a job, and a good one, that pays $60,000 per year. Now we're taking away all your benefits. Enjoy the $1?" Also, the safety net does include a detailed bureaucracy to determine who is needy. Disability, unemployment, and so forth look hard at these issues. Replicating that with a different set of rules for each program seems mighty wasteful. Another wild idea: Good economists all understand that consumption, not income, is the right measure of well being. That's why consumption taxes are a good idea, and we should measure consumption diversity not income diversity. (I don't use the word "inequality" anymore as it prejudices the right answer.) One advantage of a consumption tax is that it would be easier to condition benefits on consumption rather than income. If you work and save the results, you can keep your benefits. One last point, which maybe should be the first point. It is a bit scandalous that income phase outs in social programs take away benefits based on market income, but not social program income. If you have food stamps and earn an extra $10,000 of income, you can lose your foods stamps. If you get housing worth $10,000, you don't lose anything. Ditto in the entire social program system. This is an immense distortion towards putting effort into obtaining more social programs rather than working. Phasing out based on consumption, including cash and non cash benefits, would make a lot more sense. But one could phase out benefits based on which other benefits you receive too. Disincentives come from the social program and tax system overall, and any hope of continuing disincentives and saving money must take a similar integrated system approach. The argument also is over how much money the programs cost. That leads to "how could you be so heartless" vs. "but the country will go broke," also going nowhere. A focus on incentives offers the way out. Fix the incentives, and we end up helping people who need it a lot better, we end up with a lot fewer people who need help, and spend a lot less money. Win win win. There is no clean answer. A main lesson of economics is that there is always a tradeoff between help and disincentives, between insurance and moral hazard. We can make this tradeoff a lot more efficient than it is, but we can't totally eliminate the tradeoff. The bottom line remains, this discussion would be a lot more productive discussion if we talked about the constraint posed by incentives, rather than the usual moral mudslinging.    Update:So work requirements are a little tightened, but not if you have Medicaid. WTF? Medicaid is limited by income. The incentive spaghetti here would be fun to unravel. Of course, we have an  additional reason to stay below the income cap for Medicaid. We have an additional incentive to sign up for Medicaid, which may be the idea here. "Get a job, lose your food stamps, or sign up for this free government program." Hmm. Feel free to riff on this one in the comments...   

It is surprising that although the IPPF is 27 years old it has never previously had a meeting on this topic. On rational grounds, it is one of the first subjects at which it might have looked because many of the data we have discussed were available long ago. I remember reading about a Western doctor in Asia who saw the familiar scene of a mother with a young baby being suckled from one breast and an older child from the other breast but, in this case, the older one was also smoking a cigarette between sucks! Perhaps we need some kind of startling image like that to make us look closely at the role of lactation in fertility regulation.

Deficiency of iron is a major cause for disability and mortality globally and it occurs due to non-absorption of iron from diet. Hence, the physiological requirements of human body cannot be met leading to various conditions of health concern such as gestational complications, poor pregnancy outcome, decreased educational and occupational performance. Usually, the dietary iron bioavailability is low in populations consuming vegetarian diet. This iron deficiency can cause several health and economic losses. At large, whole nation and country suffers as a consequence. Iron requirements are at specified upward extent in adolescents, particularly during the rapid growth period [1]. Overweight children and adolescents are at higher risk of iron deficiency due to insufficient dietary intake of iron and use of those foods which are unbalance in nutrition [2]. Menstrual blood iron losses varies markedly from one woman to another but these losses are very constant for an individual from month to month [3]. Even in geographically widely separated populations of the world, the central part of the variation of menstrual blood losses is controlled genetically by fibrinolytic activators in the uterine mucosa. The variations in iron contents in different populations are related to a variation in the absorption of iron from the diets but not related to a variation in iron requirements [4,5]. Iron supplementation and flour fortification can control iron deficiency in populations. Governments should take initiatives by monitoring the health status of populations by adopting various methodologies and conducting surveys, follow ups and then providing fortified foods to deficient populations, taking special care of pregnant anemic women and devising a proper policy and guidelines in this regard.

Although significant advances have been made in the theory and
practice of appraisal of roads projects, little is known about the
determination of the overall requirements of roads for a country as a
whole. Planners are often on the look out of a criteria for the same.
The development plans of Pakistan and India, particularly the Nagpur and
Bombay road plans of the latter, [Ministry of Shipping and Transport
(1984)] are an indication of the same. Comparisons of road length per
unit of area or population are commonly made between regions, countries,
etc. to highlight the availability or deficiency of roads. Rarely
mention is made of location and geographical factors and resource
constraints which are more relevant for the purpose. This paper intends
to identify factors affecting requirements of roads in a country and to
determine the form and strength of relationships of those variables to
overall requirements of roads, with a view to assist the authorities in
the formulation of policy for the development of roads in the
country.