How has government healthcare spending prepared countries for tackling the COVID19 pandemic? Arguably, spending is the primary policy tool of governments in providing effective health. We argue that the effectiveness of spending in reducing COVID deaths is conditional on the existence of...

How has government spending on health prepared countries for tackling the Covid-19 pandemic? Arguably, spending is the primary policy tool for governments for providing effective health. Yet, much empirical evidence suggests that spending alone has little effect on health outcomes. We argue that...

Health policies seek to achieve conflicting objectives. We argue that the objective of saving lives is best served by a careful balancing of fairness and efficiency considerations. Open, fair and equitable access to health care for all citizens will lower overall mortality rates by enabling the...

Premature mortality exhibits strong spatial patterns in Great Britain. Local authorities that are located further North and West, that are more distant from its political centre London and that are more urban tend to have a higher premature mortality rate. Premature mortality also tends to...

Aim: Despite the country’s explicit political goal to establish equivalent living conditions across Germany, significant inequality continues to exist. We argue that premature mortality is an excellent proxy variable for testing the claim of equivalent living conditions since the root causes...

Learning from natural disasters is predominantly regarded as beneficial: Individuals and governments learn to cope and thereby reduce damage and loss of life in future disasters. We argue against this standard narrative and point to two principal ways in which learning from past disasters can...

Objectives. We examined the effects of market income inequality (income inequality before taxes and transfers) and income redistribution via taxes and transfers on inequality in longevity. Methods. We used life tables to compute Gini coefficients of longevity inequality for all individuals and...