The purpose of this research paper is to compare health care systems in three highly advanced industrialized countries: The United States of America, Canada and Germany. The first part of the research paper will focus on the description of health care systems in the above-mentioned countries while the second part will analyze, evaluate and compare the three systems regarding equity and efficiency. Finally, an overview of recent changes and proposed future reforms in these countries will be provided as well. We start by providing a general description and comparison of the structure of health care systems in Canada, Germany and the United States.

Applying NINDS recommendations is potentially cost-effective, although reducing the time from stroke onset to emergency department arrival may be even more so.

This article presents a statistical study of the determinants of democracy in the postwar period. Important variables are found to be former status as a British colony, island status, the share of the population professing Islam, the share of the population that is of European descent, penetration of the English language during British colonial rule, and a measure of ethnic homogeneity. The evidence suggests that cultural beliefs and institutional inheritances are important determinants of the viability of democracy in poor countries, even when controlling for literacy and socioeconomic development.NOTE: The authors thank John Adams for detailed comments on an earlier draft of this article.

In this study we address the following question--what determines the allocation of publiclyprovided goods to rural households in India? Our paper is empirically driven but we draw on the characteristics of India's institutional structure and the implications of existing literature for framing the answer to this question. We confront the main empirical implications drawn from this frame of reference with a unique data set for India which brings together the widely used district data with a recently constructed data set on political participation. Our empirical results identify four important determinants of the outcomes of this allocation process: formal and informal characteristics of each state allocation mechanism, selectivity in the allocations against Muslims and scheduled castes; bureaucratic rules and behavior; and characteristics of the electoral participation process.

This article uses a unique data set to investigate the determinants of political participation in India. In particular, the data from the 1981 census of India are coupled with electoral returns from 1979-80 to examine the factors influencing participation of both genders. Differential impact is explored empirically. Many of the same influences found to be important in developed countries are relevant in India, including income, education, and constituency culture. In addition, labor force participation and familial obligations have an effect, though in the opposite direction from that predicted in the United States. A lack of government-provided resources devoted to health and education also influences participation. A second investigation uses the same census data with 1977-78 election returns to estimate government response to female political participation in India. Regarding the causes of child mortality, no effect of female participation on health outcomes was found. This may result from the aggregation necessary to match census districts and voting constituencies.