Search results for " Country"
showing 10 items of 519 documents
Forecasting US Growth During the Great Recession: Is the Financial Volatility the Missing Ingredient?
2012
The Great Recession endured by the main industrialized countries during the period 2008-2009, in the wake of the financial and banking crisis, has pointed out the major role of the financial sector on macroeconomic fluctuations. In this respect, many researchers have started to reconsider the linkages between financial and macroeconomic areas. In this paper, we evaluate the leading role of the daily volatility of two major financial variables, namely commodity and stock prices, in their ability to anticipate the output growth. For this purpose, we propose an extended MIDAS model that allows the forecasting of the quarterly output growth rate using exogenous variables sampled at various high…
Product and process innovation and total factor productivity: Evidence for manufacturing in four Latin American countries
2017
The literature on firm productivity recognizes the important role played by firm innovation activities on firm productivity in developed countries. However, the literature for developing and emerging economies is scarce and far from conclusive. The aim of this paper is to study the innovation–productivity link (distinguishing between process and product innovations) for manufacturing at the firm level for four Latin American countries (two classified as upper-middle income countries by the World Bank—Argentina and Mexico—and two as lower-middle income—Colombia and Peru). We aim testing whether the level of development is a mediating factor in the innovation–productivity link. The data used …
Can fiscal decentralization alleviate government consumption volatility?
2016
We analyse how fiscal decentralization affects the volatility of government consumption extending the existing literature that mainly deals with the effects of the former on government size. Using data for 97 developed and developing countries from 1971 to 2010, we find that a higher degree of fiscal decentralization leads to lower government consumption volatility. This result holds for the sub-sample of advanced economies, while it is not confirmed for those less-developed. This mechanism seems to work mainly through a lower volatility of the non-discretionary spending, which typically belongs to the central government’s policy. We also confirm existing findings according to which country…
Reproducibility and Validity of a Short Food Frequency Questionnaire for Dietary Assessment in Children Aged 7–9 Years in Spain
2019
The purpose of this study was to examine if the short semi-quantitative food frequency questionnaire (FFQ) is a reliable and valid tool to assess the diet of Spanish children aged 7&ndash
A cross-country examination of emotional eating, restrained eating and intuitive eating: Measurement Invariance across eight countries
2020
This study examined the measurement invariance of three scales that assessed emotional eating, restrained eating, and intuitive eating across eight countries (Australia, Belgium, Canada, China, Italy, Japan, Spain and the United States) in order to determine their suitability for cross-country body image research. A total of 6272 young adults took part in this study. Participants completed an online survey including the Emotional Eating subscale of the Three Factor Eating Questionnaire-Revised 21, the Restraint subscale of the Eating Disorder Examination Questionnaire, and the Reliance on Hunger and Satiety Cues subscale of The Intuitive Eating Scale-2. Multi-group confirmatory factor analy…
Geo-economic variations in epidemiology, patterns of care, and outcomes in patients with acute respiratory distress syndrome: insights from the LUNG …
2017
Background Little information is available about the geo-economic variations in demographics, management, and outcomes of patients with acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). We aimed to characterise the effect of these geo-economic variations in patients enrolled in the Large Observational Study to Understand the Global Impact of Severe Acute Respiratory Failure (LUNG SAFE). Methods LUNG SAFE was done during 4 consecutive weeks in winter, 2014, in a convenience sample of 459 intensive-care units in 50 countries across six continents. Inclusion criteria were admission to a participating intensive-care unit (including transfers) within the enrolment window and receipt of invasive or non…
Mapping disparities in education across low- and middle-income countries
2020
Educational attainment is an important social determinant of maternal, newborn, and child health1–3. As a tool for promoting gender equity, it has gained increasing traction in popular media, international aid strategies, and global agenda-setting4–6. The global health agenda is increasingly focused on evidence of precision public health, which illustrates the subnational distribution of disease and illness7,8; however, an agenda focused on future equity must integrate comparable evidence on the distribution of social determinants of health9–11. Here we expand on the available precision SDG evidence by estimating the subnational distribution of educational attainment, including the proporti…
Food insecurity (hunger) and suicide attempts among 179,771 adolescents attending school from 9 high-income, 31 middle-income, and 4 low-income count…
2019
BACKGROUND: Data on food insecurity and suicide attempts in adolescence are scarce. Thus, the aim of the current study was to assess the association between food insecurity (hunger) and suicide attempts in adolescents from 44 countries. METHODS: Cross-sectional, school-based data from the Global School-based Student Health Survey were analyzed. Data on past 12-month suicide attempts and past 30-day food insecurity (hunger) were collected. Multivariable logistic regression, meta-analysis, and meta-regression were conducted to assess the associations. RESULTS: The final sample consisted of 179,771 adolescents attending school. The prevalence of moderate (rarely/sometimes hungry) and severe (m…
Physical activity of children: a global matrix of grades comparing 15 countries.
2014
The Active Healthy Kids Canada (AHKC) Report Card on Physical Activity for Children and Youth has been effective in powering the movement to get kids moving by influencing priorities, policies, and practice in Canada. The AHKC Report Card process was replicated in 14 additional countries from 5 continents using 9 common indicators (Overall Physical Activity, Organized Sport Participation, Active Play, Active Transportation, Sedentary Behavior, Family and Peers, School, Community and Built Environment, and Government Strategies and Investments), a harmonized process and a standardized grading framework. The 15 Report Cards were presented at the Global Summit on the Physical Activity of Child…
Adolescents' knowledge and attitudes concerning HIV infection and HIV-infected persons: how a survey and focus group discussions are suited for resea…
1999
The purpose of this article is to examine how two different corpora of material are suited for researching the sexuality of youth on the basis of material gathered via a structured questionnaire (N = 1183 response rate 87%) and via eight focus group discussions (FGDs) and to investigate the knowledge and opinions of adolescents at the age of 15 years about HIV infection and HIV-infected persons. Both boys and girls showed a good level of knowledge about HIV infection and AIDS. While their level of knowledge was good their attitude was that the threat of an HIV infection was not a personal issue. Furthermore negative attitudes to those having HIV/AIDS became more pronounced the more socially…