Abstract: Social interactions in infancy have implications for long-term outcomes. This study uses data from a sample of 1412 rural Chinese infants aged 6–12 and 24–30 months to examine the relationship between peer interactions and cognitive development. Over 75% of the infants in this sample had less than three peers and around 20% had no peers in both periods. The prevalence of cognitive delays is high within this sample and increases as infants age. Multivariate analysis reveals that peer interaction is significantly associated with cognitive development. Heterogeneous analysis suggests that peer interactions and mental development may be related to the child’s primary caregiver and the distance from the child’s household to the center of their village.

A favorite icon for cigarette manufacturers across China since the mid-twentieth century has been the panda, with factories from Shanghai to Sichuan using cuddly cliché to market tobacco products. The proliferation of panda-branded cigarettes coincides with profound, yet poorly appreciated, shifts in the worldwide tobacco trade. Over the last fifty years, transnational tobacco companies and their allies have fueled a tripling of the world's annual consumption of cigarettes. At the forefront is the China National Tobacco Corporation, now producing forty percent of cigarettes sold globally. What's enabled the manufacturing of cigarettes in China to flourish since the time of Mao and to prosper even amidst public health condemnation of smoking? 

In Poisonous Pandas, an interdisciplinary group of scholars comes together to tell that story. They offer novel portraits of people within the Chinese polity—government leaders, scientists, tax officials, artists, museum curators, and soldiers—who have experimentally revamped the country's pre-Communist cigarette supply chain and fitfully expanded its political, economic, and cultural influence. These portraits cut against the grain of what contemporary tobacco-control experts typically study, opening a vital new window on tobacco—the single largest cause of preventable death worldwide today.

You can read the Introduction and Chapter 1 online.

About the editors

We analyze the effects of early-life shocks with varying degrees of severity on mortality and human capital outcomes in the Philippines. We exploit variations in typhoon exposure and the introduction of a short-term post-disaster relief policy. Severe
typhoons are associated with increased mortality and adverse long-term outcomes. Before the disaster relief policy, mortality from in utero exposure to severe typhoons was 10 percent, and survivors exhibited similar levels of human capital as the unaffected.
Once implemented, the policy appears to have mitigated the mortality effect of severe typhoons, and survivors have lower human capital in the long term.

Keywords: fetal origins hypothesis, selective mortality, long-term outcomes, Philippines, natural disasters, disaster relief

JEL codes: I12, I15, O15

Although many public hospital physicians in Vietnam offer private service on the side, little is known about the magnitude and nature of the phenomenon of so-called dual practice, let alone the dynamics between the public and private health sectors. This study investigates how and to what degree public hospital physicians engage in private practice. It also examines the commitment of dual practitioners to the public sector. The analysis is based on a hospital-based survey of 483 physicians at 10 public hospitals in four provinces of Vietnam. Nearly half of the participants in the study sample reported themselves as dual practitioners. Various types of private practice were mentioned. Private practice at health facilities owned by the private sector was the most prevalent, followed by private practice delivered at health facilities owned by the dual practitioners themselves. Private practice inside public hospitals was also noted. Dual practitioners were likely to be senior and hold management positions inside their public hospitals. Substantial income differences were found between dual practitioners and those physicians practicing in only the public sector. The majority of dual practitioners, however, reported the willingness to give up private practice if certain conditions were met, such as a basic salary increase or non-pecuniary benefits. The main reasons dual practitioners gave for not leaving the public sector included a sense of public responsibility and opportunities to gain a broader professional network and more training. This study reiterates the significant challenges associated with dual practice, including its financial implications and possible effects on health care quality and access. The need for a high-quality workforce committed to the public sector is particularly critical, given the
possibility of universal insurance coverage. Future research should address the need to improve data collection on physicians’ dual practice and incorporate the topic in policy debates on health reform.

Keywords: physician dual practice, public-private mix, Vietnam, human resources for health, hospital reform, health system research, low- and middle-income countries, universal health coverage.

Published: https://academic.oup.com/heapol/article/33/8/898/5078580

High costs of precision medicine raise concerns about exacerbating income-related disparities in healthcare utilization and health outcomes. One approach to expanding coverage in Asia has been to cover the precision therapy but require the pharmaceutical firm to cover the costs of the companion diagnostic test. Taiwan’s National Health Insurance (NHI) adopted this approach for lung cancer, colorectal cancer and leukemia, but not for the first target therapy covered by NHI, trastuzumab for the treatment of HER2-positive breast cancer. Analyzing a unique dataset linking medical claims, cancer registry data and proxies for income between 2004 and 2015, we find that lower-income patients are more likely to be diagnosed with later stages of breast cancer, and this pattern renders NHI coverage of anti-HER2 therapy pro-poor even before full coverage of the diagnostic tests.

Moreover, the expansion of NHI coverage—including the FISH diagnostic test and trastuzumab for early-stage breast cancer—strengthened the pro-poor distribution of genetic testing and target treatment, albeit only marginally. The extent of pharmaceutical company coverage of testing and its impact on patient access are topics of our ongoing research, contrasting breast cancer with colorectal cancer.

Keywords: disparities, personalized medicine, income-related inequality, breast cancer, genetic testing, Taiwan, Asia