Inequality in body mass indices across countries: Evidence from convergence tests

Disparities in premature mortality: Evidence for the OECD countries

This paper studies the existence of international health outcome disparities. We focus on the use of the potential years of life lost for a database that includes information from 33 OECD countries and covers the period 1990-2017. The methodology proposed by Phillips and Sul (2007) allows us to reject the existence of a single pattern of behaviour between countries for both males and females, suggesting the existence of severe health outcome inequalities. This methodology estimates the existence of four convergence clubs whose composition slightly varies when comparing the male and female cases. Some socioeconomic factors are found to be very important in explaining the forces that may drive the creation of these convergence clubs. In particular, the evolution of the economy and health policies are pivotal to understanding the creation of these estimated convergence clubs. Additionally, our results offer evidence in favor of the importance of environmental policies to explain these health outcome differences.

An Early Warning Risk and Control Model for Manpower Capital Investment Using Data Warehousing and Computational Intelligence

Human capital plays an important role in the development of enterprises. Investing in human capital is the main focus of enterprises to improve personnel quality and enhance their core competitiveness. With the development of market economy, the function of human resource market allocation has been improved and the mobility of enterprise human resources has been enhanced leading to the increase in investment risk of enterprise human capital. Enterprise human capital investment risk has a negative impact on enterprises, reduces the income of enterprises' human capital investment, and affects their growth. Hence, enterprises need to avoid the risk of human capital investment or minimize the negative impact of risk. Using the data warehouse and computational intelligence, this paper constructs the early warning and control model for human capital investment risk and analyzes the existing approaches during the recruitment process and training, investment, and production, among enterprises. Finally, this paper proposes the corresponding control method according to the model inspiration.

Disparities in the Evolution of the COVID-19 Pandemic between Spanish Provinces

Spain experienced a second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in autumn 2020, which has been approached with different measures by regional authorities. We analyze the presence of convergence in the cumulative incidence for 14 days (CI14) in provinces and self-governing cities. The Phillips-Sul methodology was used to study the grouping of behavior between provinces, and an ordered logit model was estimated to understand the forces that drive creating the different convergence clubs. We reject the presence of a single pattern of behavior in the evolution of the CI14 across territories. Four statistically different convergence clubs and an additional province (Madrid) with divergent behavior are observed. Provinces with developed agricultural and industrial economic sectors, high mobility, and a high proportion of Central and South American immigrants had the highest level of CI14. We show that the transmission of the virus is not homogeneous in the Spanish national territory. Our results are helpful for identifying differences in determinants that could explain the pandemic's evolution and for formulating hypotheses about the effectiveness of implemented measures.

Global Trends in Child Obesity: Are Figures Converging?

Childhood obesity has become one of the most serious global health challenges of our time. The combined prevalence of overweight and obesity has rapidly increased worldwide during the last two decades, especially in some developing countries where obesity is reaching levels on a par with some industrialized countries, or even higher. This fast growth has occurred especially in countries in the midst of rapid social-economic transitions. Most international comparisons focus on the adult population while analyses focusing on the child population are more limited. Using the methodology developed by Phillips and Sul, this paper studies the worldwide evolution of children’s body mass index (BMI), overweight and obesity prevalence for a large sample of countries during the period 1975–2016. Our results indicate that the figures for BMI or the prevalence of obesity in different countries do not converge, while the opposite is the case for overweight prevalence in children. Furthermore, there is a non-linear relationship between obesity and income or human capital, indicating that low and middle-income countries require a strong initiative for health policies targeting obesity prevention.

Premature mortality in the US: A convergence study

Premature mortality is an important public health indicator with ramifications to social and economic outcomes. The purpose of this study is to examine whether premature mortality, measured by the years of potential life lost (YPLL), converges among the U.S. states and which mortality components lead to divergence. To this end, we calculate the YPLL and apply the Phillips and Sul (2007, 2009) convergence test methodology. We find that for males and blacks all U.S. states converge to a steady-state while for females, whites and total population, the states form convergence clubs. These clubs differ mainly due to variances in infant, cardiovascular and unintentional injury mortalities with the ones with the lesser YPLL located mainly on the west and east coast.