Investigating the effects of ICT, education, and R&D on economic efficiency and technology heterogeneity: A cross-country analysis
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SUBMITTER: Aljneibi R
PROVIDER: S-EPMC10979069 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Mar
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:Background and objectivesGlobally, a number of countries have developed guidelines that describe the design and conduct of economic evaluations as part of health technology assessment (HTA) or pharmacoeconomic analysis for decision making. The current scoping review was undertaken with an objective to summarize the recommendations made on methods of economic evaluation by the national healthcare economic evaluation (HEE) guidelines.MethodologyA comprehensive search was undertaken in the website repositories of the International Society for Pharmacoeconomic and Outcomes Research (ISPOR) and Guide to Economic Analysis and Research (GEAR), and websites of national HTA agencies and ministries of health of individual countries. All guidelines in the English language were included in this review. Data were extracted with respect to general and methodological characteristics, and a descriptive analysis of recommendations made across the countries was undertaken.ResultsOverall, our review included 31 national HEE guidelines, published between 1997 and August 2020. Nearly half (45%) of the guidelines targeted the evaluation of pharmaceuticals. The nature of the guidelines was either mandatory (31%), recommendatory (42%), or voluntary (16%). There was a substantial consensus among the guidelines on several key principles, including type of economic evaluation (cost-utility analysis), time horizon of the analysis (long enough), health outcome measure (quality-adjusted life-years) and use of sensitivity analyses. The recommendations on study perspective, comparator, discount rate and type of costs to be included (particularly the inclusion of indirect costs) varied widely.ConclusionDespite similarity in the overall processes, variation in several recommendations given by various national HEE guidelines was observed. This is perhaps unsurprising given the differences in the health systems and financing mechanisms, capacity of local researchers, and data availability. This review offers important lessons and a starting point for countries that are planning to develop their own HEE guidelines.
| S-EPMC8333164 | biostudies-literature
Project description:This scoping review aims to map the current understanding of pre-service teachers' beliefs about ICT, identify critical research gaps, and provide actionable insights for teacher education policy and practice. A comprehensive search of seven electronic databases yielded 1366 studies, of which 277 were included. The review identified seven key themes, including a predominant focus on general ICT beliefs and the limited exploration of cutting-edge technologies or regional variations. Quantitative methods dominated the research landscape, often employing standardized instruments like the Technology Attitude Scale. The findings highlight the need for greater emphasis on underrepresented regions, innovative technologies, and qualitative methodologies to deepen contextual understanding. This review offers a foundational resource for stakeholders in teacher education and sets the stage for future research to bridge identified gaps, ultimately enhancing the integration of ICT in teacher training and classroom practice.
| S-EPMC11805408 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The expansion of information and communications technology (ICT) trade has contributed to rising trade imbalances and international tensions. A detailed assessment of the potential carbon and economic impacts of ICT trade is pertinent. We assess to what extent and how the carbon costs and economic benefits embodied in ICT trade were unevenly distributed among global regions in the period 2000-2018 using multiregional input-output models. We show that in 2018, emerging economies received 82% of the CO2 emissions while developed economies gained 42% of the value-added in ICT exports. This carbon-economic inequality (CEI) decreased (i.e., improved) by 16% from 2000 to 2018, arising from global production fragmentation, with developed economies retaining downstream high value-added ICT marketing but outsourcing upper- and middle-stream carbon-intensive material extraction and manufacturing to emerging economies. This study provides insights for enhancing negotiations and cooperation among global regions to light a path toward sustainable ICT trade.
| S-EPMC9707049 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Background. Single-disease-focused treatment and hospital-centric care are poorly suited to meet complex needs in an era of multimorbidity. Understanding variation in palliative care's association with treatment choices is essential to optimizing interdisciplinary decision making in care of complex patients. Aim. To estimate the association between palliative care and hospital costs by primary diagnosis and multimorbidity for adults with one of six life-limiting conditions: heart failure, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), liver failure, kidney failure, neurodegenerative conditions including dementia, and HIV/AIDS. Methods. Data from four studies (2002-2015) were pooled to provide an analytic dataset of 73,304 participants with mean costs $10,483, of whom 5,348 (7%) received palliative care. We estimated average effect of palliative care on direct hospital costs among the treated, using propensity scores to control for observed confounding. Results. Palliative care was associated with a statistically significant reduction in total direct costs for heart failure (estimated treatment effect: -$2666; 95% confidence interval [CI]: -$3440 to -$1892), neurodegenerative conditions (-$3523; -$4394 to -$2651), COPD (-$1613; -$2217 to -$1009), kidney failure (-$3589; -$5132 to -$2045), and liver failure (-$7574; -$9232 to -$5916). The association for liver failure patients was statistically significantly larger than for any other disease group. Cost-saving associations were also statistically larger for patients with multimorbidity than single disease for two of the six groups: neurodegenerative and liver failure. Conclusions. Heterogeneity in treatment effect estimates was observable in assessing association between palliative care and hospital costs for adults with serious life-limiting illnesses other than cancer. The results illustrate the importance of careful definition of palliative care populations in research and practice, and raise further questions about the role of interdisciplinary decision making in treatment of complex medical illness.
| S-EPMC6737878 | biostudies-literature
Project description:This paper studies the social and economic responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in a large sample of countries. I stress, in particular, the importance of countries' interconnections to understand the spread of the virus. I estimate a global VAR model and exploit a dataset on existing social connections across country borders. I show that social networks help explain not only the spread of the disease but also cross-country spillovers in perceptions about coronavirus risk and in social distancing behavior. In the early phases of the pandemic, perceptions of coronavirus risk in most countries are affected by pandemic shocks originating in Italy. Later, the USA, Spain, and the UK play sizable roles. Social distancing responses to domestic and global health shocks are heterogeneous; however, they almost always exhibit delays and sluggish adjustments. Unemployment responses vary widely across countries. Unemployment is particularly responsive to health shocks in the USA and Spain, while unemployment fluctuFations are attenuated almost everywhere else.
| S-EPMC7437387 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The paper examines the dynamics of native populations' opposition to migration and the role of education in shaping such opposition in European countries using data from the last four editions of the European Social Survey between years 2010 and 2016. We examine both the direct association between education and opposition to migration as well as the mediated association that occurs through feelings of threat. We test for measurement equivalence across countries and years of the two latent constructs in our analyses (opposition to migration and feelings of threat) by applying sequential methods used in alignment optimization to identify partial equivalence and check the level of approximate measurement invariance using BSEM modeling. Our results indicate that the opposition to migration and the feelings of threat scales achieve metric invariance but not scalar invariance in cross-country comparisons. At the substantive level, our findings suggest that better educated individuals express lower opposition to migration than the poorly educated and that as much as 60% of education differentials in opposition to migration are due to the mediated effect through feelings of threat. The high degree of heterogeneity in associations both across countries and over time are, in part, explained by the presence of foreign-born populations and living standards in a country and time point.
| S-EPMC6842942 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The performances of different types of banks may vary due to heterogeneous technology, which can be examined by metafrontier analysis. However, the metafrontier constructed in most existing literature is concave, resulting in a biased estimation of efficiency. Based on 93 Chinese commercial banks over the period of 2005-2016, we first evaluate the banking efficiency by using the proposed data envelopment analysis (DEA) model, NCMeta-US-NSBM, which simultaneously incorporates a non-concave metafrontier technique, undesirable outputs, and super efficiency into a network slacks-based measure (NSBM) model. Subsequently, the evolution of banking efficiency during the study period is investigated on the basis of the Dagum Gini index and kernel density estimation methods. The main empirical results show the following. 1) There exists significant disparity/heterogeneity in banking efficiency for overall efficiency, productivity efficiency, and profitability efficiency. 2) The results of the technology gap ratio (TGR) and the evaluation of stated-owned banks (SOB), joint-stock banks (JSB), and city commercial banks (CCB) in the productivity stage are higher than those in the profitability stage, indicating that most of the banks have a large space for improvement, especially for SOB and JSB in the profitability stage. 3) The major contribution of the overall difference of banking efficiency in China is the intensity of the transvariation. 4) Although the kernel density estimations for different efficiency scores have similar distributions in corresponding years, the multilevel differentiation phenomenon of banking efficiency may appear after 2008.
| S-EPMC6168140 | biostudies-literature
Project description:PurposeInterprofessional communication skills are an essential competency for medical students training to be physicians. Nevertheless, interprofessional education (IPE) is relatively rare in Korean medical schools compared with those overseas. We attempted to evaluate the effectiveness of the first IPE program in our school.MethodsIn the first semester of the school year 2018, third-grade medical students (N=149) at the Seoul National University College of Medicine participated in 'communication between healthcare professionals in the clinical field' training, which consisted of small group discussions and role-play. To evaluate the effectiveness of this training, we conducted pre- and post-training questionnaire surveys. Comparing paired t-tests, we evaluated the students' competency in interpersonal communication and their attitude towards the importance of IPE before and after the training. The Global Interpersonal Communication Competence Scale (GICC-15) was used to evaluate competency in interpersonal communication.ResultsOut of 149 students, 144 completed the pre- and post-training questionnaires. The total GICC-15 scores before and after training were 55.60±6.94 (mean±standard deviation) and 58.89±7.34, respectively (p=0.000). All subcategory scores of GICC-15 after training were higher after training and were statistically significant (p<0.05), except for two subcategories. The importance of IPE score also improved after training but was not significant (p=0.159). The appropriateness of content and training method scores were 3.99±0.92 and 3.94±1.00, respectively.ConclusionFrom the results, our school's IPE program demonstrated a positive overall educational effect. Deployment of systematic and varied IPE courses is expected in the future, with more longitudinal evaluation of educational effect.
| S-EPMC6589613 | biostudies-literature
Project description:This study investigated whether individualism and collectivism (IC) at country, individual, and situational level influence how quickly and accurately people can infer mental states (i.e. theory of mind, or ToM), indexed by accuracy and reaction time in a ToM task. We hypothesized that collectivism (having an interdependent self and valuing group concerns), compared to individualism (having an independent self and valuing personal concerns), is associated with greater accuracy and speed in recognizing and understanding the thoughts and feelings of others. Students (N = 207) from individualism-representative (the Netherlands) and collectivism-representative (Vietnam) countries (Country IC) answered an individualism-collectivism questionnaire (Individual IC) and were randomly assigned to an individualism-primed, collectivism-primed, or no-prime task (Situational IC) before performing a ToM task. The data showed vast differences between the Dutch and Vietnamese groups that might not be attributable to experimental manipulation. Therefore, we analyzed the data for the groups separately and found that Individual IC did not predict ToM accuracy or reaction time performance. Regarding Situational IC, when primed with individualism, the accuracy performance of Vietnamese participants in affective ToM trials decreased compared to when primed with collectivism and when no prime was used. However, an interesting pattern emerged: Dutch participants were least accurate in affective ToM trials, while Vietnamese participants were quickest in affective ToM trials. Our research also highlights a dilemma faced by cross-cultural researchers who use hard-to-reach populations but face the challenge of disentangling experimental effects from biases that might emerge due to an interaction between cultural differences and experimental settings. We propose suggestions for overcoming such challenges.
| S-EPMC5568381 | biostudies-literature
Project description:This study aims to understand the nature of information and communication technology in technology convergence. We form a knowledge network by applying social network theories to Korean patent data collected from the European Patent Organization. A knowledge network consists of nodes representing technology sectors identified by their International Patent Classification codes and edges that link International Patent Classification codes when they appear concurrently in a patent. We test the proposed hypotheses using four indices (degree centrality, E-I index, entropy index, and clustering coefficient). The results show that information and communication technology is easily attached but tends to converge with similar technology and has the greatest influence on technology convergence over other technologies. This study is expected to help practitioners and policymakers understand the structure and interaction mechanisms of technology from a systematic perspective and improve national-level technology policies.
| S-EPMC8270446 | biostudies-literature