Welfare states as lifecycle redistribution machines: Decomposing the roles of age and socio-economic status shows that European tax-and-benefit systems primarily redistribute across age groups.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Vanhuysse P
PROVIDER: S-EPMC8386825 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:This paper provides empirical evidence that individuals substantially revise their stated wealth redistribution preferences after fiscal scandals. The 2016 Panama Papers scandal revealed top-income tax evasion behaviour simultaneously worldwide. The empirical investigation exploits this event as a quasi-natural experiment. I rely on two original datasets, a UK household longitudinal dataset and a survey conducted in 22 European countries. I use a difference-in-differences strategy and find that pro-redistribution statements increased between 2% and 3.3% after the scandal. Responses are heterogeneous and larger for right-wing individuals and low-income individuals. This change in wealth redistribution preferences is likely to have been translated into a slight change in votes. The results suggest an increase in stated voting intentions for the left and a decrease for the right. Complementary estimations reveal that more media coverage and more individuals involved by country increase the magnitude of the response.
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Project description:Although many countries are making progress towards achieving the global sustainable development goals, sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) lags behind. SSA bears a relatively higher burden of maternal morbidity and mortality than other regions despite existing cost-effective interventions. This paper assesses antenatal care (ANC) service utilisation among women in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) countries, one of the four SSA regions. Specifically, it assesses socioeconomic inequality in the number of ANC visits, use of no ANC service, between one and three ANC visits and at least four ANC visits, previously recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO). Data come from the most recent Demographic and Health Surveys in twelve SADC countries. Wagstaff's normalised concentration index (CI) was used to assess socioeconomic inequalities. Factors explaining these inequalities were assessed using a standard method and similar variables contained in the DHS data. A positive CI means that the variable of interest is concentrated among wealthier women, while a negative CI signified the opposite. The paper found that wealthier women in the SADC countries are generally more likely to have more ANC visits than their poorer counterparts. Apart from Zambia, the CIs were positive for inequalities in at least 4 ANC visits and negative for between 1 and 3 ANC visits. Women from poorer backgrounds significantly report no ANC visits than wealthier women. Apart from the portion that was not explainable due to limitations in the variables included in the model, critical social determinants of health, including wealth, education and the number of children, explain socioeconomic inequalities in ANC coverage in SADC. A vital policy consideration is not to leave any woman behind. Therefore, addressing access barriers and critical social determinants of ANC inequalities, such as women's education and economic well-being, can potentially redress inequalities in ANC coverage in the SADC region.
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Project description:ObjectiveFraming of fiscal incentives has been suggested to be important in influencing purchase decisions. We aimed to examine the effect of framing a modest price difference between high- and lower-sugar beverages as a tax or a subsidy respectively, using messages placed on vending machines to influence beverage purchases.Design/settingThis is an 11-week randomized crossover trial conducted between August and November 2015, with a two-week run-in period before intervention, targeted at students, staff and faculty of a university campus in Singapore. Twenty-one beverage vending machines were used to implement the intervention involving 'tax message', 'subsidy message' and 'no message (control)'. The former two messages suggest 'a tax for high sugar beverages' or 'a subsidy for lower sugar beverages' respectively. Prices of the beverages offered were fixed at baseline and remained the same in all three experimental conditions: lower-sugar beverage options were priced ~ 10% lower than the corresponding high-sugar option. The machines were randomized to one of the 6 sequences of intervention. Each message intervention period was 3 weeks. The effect of messages was assessed by comparing average weekly units of beverages sold between interventions using mixed effects model.ResultsThe average weekly units of high and lower-sugar beverages sold per vending machine were 115 and 98 respectively in the control condition. The percentage of high-sugar beverages sold was 54% in the control, 53% in the tax, and 54% in the subsidy message condition. There was no difference in the weekly units of high-sugar beverages sold for the tax message (- 2, 95% CI -8 to 5, p = 0.61) or the subsidy message (0, 95% CI -10 to 10, p = 0.96) conditions as compared with the control condition. Similarly, there was no difference in the weekly units of lower-sugar beverages sold for the tax message (4, 95% CI -4 to 13, p = 0.32) or the subsidy message (7, 95% CI -4 to 18, p = 0.18) conditions as compared with the control condition.ConclusionsThe use of tax and subsidy messages to highlight modest price differences did not substantially reduce high-sugar beverage sales in vending machines on an Asian university campus.
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Project description:Interactions between people and ecological systems, through leisure or tourism activities, form a complex socio-ecological spatial network. The analysis of the benefits people derive from their interactions with nature-also referred to as cultural ecosystem services (CES)-enables a better understanding of these socio-ecological systems. In the age of information, the increasing availability of large social media databases enables a better understanding of complex socio-ecological interactions at an unprecedented spatio-temporal resolution. Within this context, we model and analyze these interactions based on information extracted from geotagged photographs embedded into a multiscale socio-ecological network. We apply this approach to 16 case study sites in Europe using a social media database (Flickr) containing more than 150,000 validated and classified photographs. After evaluating the representativeness of the network, we investigate the impact of visitors' origin on the distribution of socio-ecological interactions at different scales. First at a global scale, we develop a spatial measure of attractiveness and use this to identify four groups of sites. Then, at a local scale, we explore how the distance traveled by the users to reach a site affects the way they interact with this site in space and time. The approach developed here, integrating social media data into a network-based framework, offers a new way of visualizing and modeling interactions between humans and landscapes. Results provide valuable insights for understanding relationships between social demands for CES and the places of their realization, thus allowing for the development of more efficient conservation and planning strategies.
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Project description:Conjugation of small ubiquitin-like modifiers (SUMOs) to substrate proteins is a posttranslational protein modification that affects a diverse range of physiological processes. Global inhibition of SUMO conjugation in mice results in embryonic lethality, reflecting the importance of the SUMO pathways for embryonic development. Here, we demonstrated that SUMO1 overexpression was not well tolerated in murine embryonic carcinoma and embryonic stem (ES) cells and that only a few clones were recovered after transduction with vectors delivering SUMO1 expression constructs. Differentiated NIH/3T3 cells overexpress SUMO1 without deleterious effects and maintain high levels of both conjugated and free forms of SUMO1. The few embryonic cells surviving after forced overexpression retained all their SUMO1 in the form of a few high-molecular-weight conjugates and maintained undetectable levels of free SUMO1. The absence of free SUMO in embryonic cells was seen specifically upon overexpression of SUMO1, but not SUMO2. Moreover, blocking SUMO1 conjugation to endogenous substrates by C-terminal mutations of SUMO1 or by overexpression of a SUMO1 substrate "sponge" or by overexpression of the deSUMOylating enzyme SUMO-specific peptidase 1 (SENP1) dramatically restored free SUMO1 overexpression. The data suggest that overexpression of SUMO1 protein leading to an excess accumulation of critical SUMO1-conjugated substrates is not tolerated in embryonic cells. Surviving embryonic cells exhibit SUMO1 conjugation to allowed substrates but a complete absence of free SUMO1.IMPORTANCE Embryonic stem (ES) cells exhibit unusual transcriptional, proteomic, and signal response profiles, reflecting their unusual needs for rapid differentiation and replication. The work reported here demonstrated that mouse embryonic cell lines did not tolerate the overexpression of SUMO1, the small ubiquitin-like modifier protein that is covalently attached to many substrates to alter their intracellular localization and functionality. Forced SUMO1 overexpression is toxic to ES cells, and surviving cell populations adapt by dramatically reducing the levels of free SUMO1. Such a response is not seen in differentiated cells or with SUMO2 or with nonconjugatable SUMO1 mutants or in the presence of a SUMO1 "sponge" substrate that accepts the modification. The findings suggest that excess SUMO1 modification of specific substrates is not tolerated by embryonic cells and highlight a distinctive need for these cells to control the levels of SUMO1 available for conjugation.
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Project description:PurposeTo evaluate hypotheses about the role of acquired vitelliform lesion (AVL) in age-related macular degeneration pathophysiology.DesignLaboratory histology study; retrospective, observational case series.MethodsTwo donor eyes in a research archive with AVL and age-related macular degeneration were analyzed with light and electron microscopy for AVL content at locations matched to ex vivo B-scans. A retrospective, observational clinical cohort study of 42 eyes of 30 patients at 2 referral clinics determined the frequency of optical coherence tomography features stratified by AVL fate.ResultsHistologic and clinical cases showed subretinal drusenoid deposit and drusen. Ultrastructural AVL components in 2 donor eyes included retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) organelles (3%-22% of volume), outer segments (2%-10%), lipid droplets (0.2%-12%), and a flocculent material (57%-59%). Of 48 AVLs (mean follow-up 46 ± 39 months), 50% collapsed to complete RPE and outer retinal atrophy, 38% were stable, 10% resorbed, and 2% developed neovascularization. The Early Treatment Diabetic Retinopathy Study grid central subfield contained 77% of AVLs. Hyperreflective foci, ellipsoid zone disruption, and hyperreflective thickening of the RPE-basal lamina-Bruch membrane band were common at maximum AVL expansion. Collapsing and noncollapsing AVLs had different growth rates (rapid vs slow, respectively).ConclusionsAVL deposits contain unexpectedly low levels of RPE organelles and outer segments. Subfoveal predilection, reflectivity on optical coherence tomography, hyperautofluorescence, yellow color, and growth-regression phases suggest dysregulation of lipid transfer pathways specific to cone photoreceptors and supporting cells in formation of AVL deposit, analogous to drusen and subretinal drusenoid deposit. Prediction of AVL outcomes via growth rates should be confirmed in larger clinical studies.
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Project description:Physiological processes-such as, the brain's resting-state electrical activity or hemodynamic fluctuations-exhibit scale-free temporal structuring. However, impacts common in biological systems such as, noise, multiple signal generators, or filtering by transport function, result in multimodal scaling that cannot be reliably assessed by standard analytical tools that assume unimodal scaling. Here, we present two methods to identify breakpoints or crossovers in multimodal multifractal scaling functions. These methods incorporate the robust iterative fitting approach of the focus-based multifractal formalism (FMF). The first approach (moment-wise scaling range adaptivity) allows for a breakpoint-based adaptive treatment that analyzes segregated scale-invariant ranges. The second method (scaling function decomposition method, SFD) is a crossover-based design aimed at decomposing signal constituents from multimodal scaling functions resulting from signal addition or co-sampling, such as, contamination by uncorrelated fractals. We demonstrated that these methods could handle multimodal, mono- or multifractal, and exact or empirical signals alike. Their precision was numerically characterized on ideal signals, and a robust performance was demonstrated on exemplary empirical signals capturing resting-state brain dynamics by near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS), electroencephalography (EEG), and blood oxygen level-dependent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI-BOLD). The NIRS and fMRI-BOLD low-frequency fluctuations were dominated by a multifractal component over an underlying biologically relevant random noise, thus forming a bimodal signal. The crossover between the EEG signal components was found at the boundary between the ? and ? bands, suggesting an independent generator for the multifractal ? rhythm. The robust implementation of the SFD method should be regarded as essential in the seamless processing of large volumes of bimodal fMRI-BOLD imaging data for the topology of multifractal metrics free of the masking effect of the underlying random noise.
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