Long-Term Care of Older Adults in Malta: Influencing Factors and Their Social Impacts Amid The International Financial Crisis

ABSTRACT

This article explores recent changes in long-term care (LTC) for older persons in Malta, resulting from restructuring or other contextual factors related to the international financial crisis. The ageing population continues to grow, while traditional ways of providing care for the ageing population are progressively dwindling. Waiting lists for residential care have grown longer, although public-private partnerships have served to shorten these lists to some degree. Community care services are not keeping pace with need, and the frail elderly wishing to remain in their own homes often cannot do so without significant assistance from other sources.

Service recipients fall into four groups: those affording private residential care; those granted a government-subsidized residential bed; those cared for at home by relatives; and those similarly cared for by nonfamily live-in caregivers with (or without) input from family members. Existent data are reviewed and analyzed along with a focus group of 30 stakeholders to explore this topic further. Future recommendations are made and consequences are explored as caregiving options move away from the responsibility of the traditional family system toward greater pressure on state-provided care, use of expensive private care, and waiting lists to secure services.     

我国金融业分类及其季度增加值计算研究

本文首先梳理了我国金融业分类的演化,借鉴国际标准产业分类体系（ISIC4.0）、新加坡金融业分类和我国香港金融业分类的基础上,对我国2011年公布的《国民经济行业分类与代码（GB/T4754–2011）》中金融业的分类提出了改进建议;其次,基于改进的金融业分类条件下,分析我国季度金融业增加值计算方法的缺陷,提出了比重模型和回归模型来改进计算方法;最后,利用2008普查年度某地区金融业数据进行实证研究,发现两个模型的计算结果均较准确。     

Financial liberalization, exchange rates and stock prices: Exogenous shocks in four Latin America countries

This paper provides an analysis of the long-run relationships and short-run dynamics between stock prices and exchange rates as well as the channels through which exogenous shocks influence these markets. We use monthly data for the period January 1980 to February 2009 for four Latin America, namely, Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Mexico. We conduct our analysis by means of cointegration analysis and multivariate Granger causality tests. The main finding of our analysis suggests that stock and foreign exchange markets in these economies are positively related and that the U.S. stock market acts as a channel for these links. Moreover, it is shown that these links are independent of foreign exchange restrictions. Finally, stability tests proposed by Hansen and Johansen (1993) are applied and it is shown that the dimension of the cointegration space is sample independent while the estimated coefficients exhibit instability in recursive estimations. Instability in these long-run relationships is evident during the Mexican currency crisis of 1994-1995, the Asian crisis of 1997 and the 2007-2009 credit and financial crisis.     

财务分析师盈余预测乐观倾向成因研究综述

财务分析师报告的盈余预测是其向市场传递信息的重要途径,同时也是向客户提供服务的主要内容,得到了理论界和实务届的广泛关注。然而,大量国内外实证研究表明,分析师提供的盈余预测带有乐观倾向。本文采用文献调查的研究方法,回顾了国外关于分析师盈余预测乐观倾向成因的相关研究。该研究对加强我国财务分析师行业建设,提高资本市场投资者的投资效率,以及资本市场相关理论研究都有一定的参考价值。     

农村金融问题研究文献综述

推进社会主义新农村建设,构建和谐社会的一项极其重要的内容就是：发展农村经济,缩小城乡收入差距,全面解决“三农”问题,促进城乡经济社会协调发展。当前制约农村经济发展的一个非常突出的问题是资金供求关系严重失衡,现有的农村金融服务体系难以满足农村经济发展对资金的需求。本文从农村金融市场的特殊性出发,分析概括了国内外学者关于农村金融问题的研究,对有代表性的文献进行梳理,以反映其最新进展,把握其动态,为农村金融问题研究的进一步发展提供一个参照平台。     

金融公司全面风险识别研究

提出了金融公司全面风险识别流程,风险识别可以看作是一个输入到输出的过程;阐述了全面风险识别需要具备的分析基础,包括业务分析报告、基本假设、历史事件经验教训、未定事项和潜在限制条件等;金融公司全面风险识别过程中应该特别注意影响因素的完整性、分析方法的科学性以及风险之间的关联性。     

The Current Situation of Retirement Income Provisions in Japan: Social Security Pension Schemes and Corporate Pension Plans

Japan has been faced with rapid population ageing for decades. This has continuously reduced the level of social security pension benefits. Based on this it is often said that corporate pension plans should play a wider role forward in providing retirement benefits. However, we also have to know that there is a limit to what corporate pension plans can do in place of the social security pension schemes. In this paper we extract lessons from the history of social security pension schemes in our country and try to define the roles of corporate pension plans and social security pension schemes. In conclusion we should keep adequacy of social security pension benefits even if the contribution rate becomes a bit higher. Corporate pension plans just enrich people's life in retirement. We have to remember that corporate pension plans were not certain means for reducing the poverty in old age and that for this reason social security pension schemes by social insurance were invented.     

Financial development and economic growth: New evidence from Tunisia

This paper examined an empirical investigation of whether financial development can boost economic growth in Tunisia. We used an Autoregressive Distributed Lag method to assess the finance-growth relation taking private credit, value traded and issuing bank's securities on the financial market as financial development indicators.The empirical results showed that the domestic credit to private sector has a positive effect on the economic growth suggesting that the financial development is a driver of a long term economic growth, but subject to a financial fragility at the short run. Moreover, this study confirmed the view of bidirectional relationship between credit and economic growth. However, we found that neither the stock market development nor the intervention of banks in the stock market had robust and positive effects on the economic growth. Thus, Tunisia is recommended to accelerate in priority the financial reforms of the Tunisian stock market in order to contribute to mobilize savings and promote long run economic growth.     

Social assistance and minimum income benefits in old and new EU democracies

Nelson K. Social assistance and minimum income benefits in old and new EU democracies Int J Soc Welfare 2010: 19: 367–378 © 2009 The Author, Journal compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd and the International Journal of Social Welfare. In this article, social assistance developments are analysed in a large number of European Union (EU) member states, including European transition countries and the new democracies of southern Europe. The empirical analysis is based on the unique and recently established SaMip Dataset, which provides social assistance benefit levels for 27 countries from 1990 to 2005. It is shown that social assistance benefits have had a less favourable development than that of unemployment provision. Hardly any of the investigated countries provide social assistance benefits above the EU near‐poverty threshold. Social assistance benefit levels have not converged in Europe. Instead, divergence can be observed, which is due mainly to lagging developments in eastern and southern Europe.