SELECTED FOR YOU... FEBRUARY 2013:
books of the month
working papers

All the Selected for you

BOOKS

Home care across Europe. Current structure and future challenges.
Les soins à domicile en Europe. Structure actuelle et défis à venir.

Naiditch M, Genet N. / éd., Boerma W. / éd., Kroneman M. / éd. et al.
Copenhague : OMS Bureau régional de l'Europe : 2012 : xiii + 145 p.


For every person over the age of 65 in today's European Union, there are four people of working age but, by 2050, there will only be two. Demand for long-term care, of which home care forms a significant part, will inevitably increase in the decades to come. Despite the importance of the issue, however, up-to-date and comparative information on home care in Europe is lacking. This book attempts to fill some of that gap by examining current European policy on home care services and strategies. This report probes a wide range of topics including the links between social services and health-care systems, the prevailing funding mechanisms, how service providers are paid, the impact of governmental regulation, and the complex roles played by informal caregivers. Drawing on a set of Europe-wide case studies (available in a second, online volume), the study provides comparable descriptive information on many aspects of the organization, financing and provision of home care across the continent. It is a text that will help frame the coming debate about how best to serve elderly citizens as European populations age.


Applied health economics.
Economie de la santé appliquée.

Jones A.M., Rice N., Bago D'Uva T., Balia S.
Abington : Routledge Taylor & Francis Group : 2012 : XX-396 p.


The first edition of Applied Health Economics did an expert job of showing how the availability of large scale data sets and the rapid advancement of advanced econometric techniques can help health economists and health professionals make sense of information better than ever before.This second edition has been revised and updated throughout and includes a new chapter on the description and modelling of individual health care costs, thus broadening the book's readership to those working on risk adjustment and health technology appraisal. The text also fully reflects the very latest advances in the health economics field and the key journal literature. Large-scale survey datasets, in particular complex survey designs such as panel data, provide a rich source of information for health economists. They offer the scope to control for individual heterogeneity and to model the dynamics of individual behaviour. However, the measures of outcome used in health economics are often qualitative or categorical. These create special problems for estimating econometric models. The dramatic growth in computing power over recent years has been accompanied by the development of methods that help to solve these problems. The purpose of this book is to provide a practical guide to the skills required to put these techniques into practice. Practical applications of the methods are illustrated using data on health from the British Health and Lifestyle Survey (HALS), the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS), the European Community Household Panel (ECHP), the US Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) and Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). There is a strong emphasis on applied work, illustrating the use of relevant computer software with code provided for Stata. Familiarity with the basic syntax and structure of Stata is assumed. The Stata code and extracts from the statistical output are embedded directly in the main text and explained at regular intervals. The book is built around empirical case studies, rather than general theory, and the emphasis is on learning by example. It presents a detailed dissection of methods and results of some recent research papers written by the authors and their colleagues. Relevant methods are presented alongside the Stata code that can be used to implement them and the empirical results are discussed at each stage. This text brings together the theory and application of health economics and econometrics, and will be a valuable reference for applied economists and students of health economics and applied econometrics (4e de couverture).


The Oxford Handbook of the social science of obesity.

Cawley J.
New York : Oxford University Press : 2011 : 16 p. + 894 p.


There is an urgent need to better understand the causes and consequences of obesity, and to learn what works to prevent or reduce obesity. This volume accurately and conveniently summarizes the findings and insights of obesity-related research from the full range of social sciences including anthropology, economics, government, psychology, and sociology. It is an excellent resource for researchers in these areas, both bringing them up to date on the relevant research in their own discipline and allowing them to quickly and easily understand the cutting-edge research being produced in other disciplines. The Oxford Handbook of the Social Science of Obesity is a critical reference for obesity researchers and is also valuable for public health officials, policymakers, nutritionists, and medical practitioners. The first section of the book explains how each social science discipline models human behavior (in particular, diet and physical activity), and summarizes the major research literatures on obesity in that discipline. The second section provides important practical information for researchers, including a guide to publicly available social science data on obesity and an overview of the challenges to causal inference in obesity research. The third part of the book synthesizes social science research on specific causes and correlates of obesity, such as food advertising, food prices, and peers. The fourth section summarizes social science research on the consequences of obesity, such as lower wages, job absenteeism, and discrimination. The fifth and final section reviews the social science literature on obesity treatment and prevention, such as food taxes, school-based interventions, and medical treatments such as anti-obesity drugs and bariatric surgery (4e de couverture).

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