Integrating ethical enquiry and health technology assessment: limits and opportunities for efficiency and equity

This paper aims at discussing some contributions, limitations and opportunities that efficiency and equity studies could make to form a better understanding of ethical issues involved in health technology assessment (HTA). Prenatal detection of Down syndrome is used as a case study for further discussions regarding efficiency and equity, as well as other ethical principles including beneficence, non-maleficence and autonomy. The development and use of adequate methods and the need for context appraisal are two imperative issues in this field of knowledge. The analysis of ethical implications in HTA should account for both. Economic evaluation methodologies have great potential in the assessment of some key ethical principles such as efficiency and equity but are of limited use concerning other fundamental principles. Social and individual values play a prominent role in this respect.     

Quality strategies in supply chain alliances of disposable items

This paper studies a single-product distribution channel where a supplier manufactures items of a given type, some of which are defective, that are sold by a retailer who only detects a subset of the defective items, passing the rest along to customers. We conjecture the structure of the demand and cost functions, assuming customers to have a decreasing marginal aversion to bad quality while both the supplier and the retailer make marginally increasing efforts to avoid bad quality. This allows us to deduce several implicit parameters of a cost model based on observable data, such as the share of the channel margin. Once the parameters of the model are available, we analyze the result of vertical integration. Although we confirm the well-known fact that vertical integration improves the quality perceived by the customer, we characterize the supplier's decision of whether or not to provide a better quality in terms of the individual channel margins. As an alternative, we derive the conditions under which the supplier and the retailer may devise a mutually beneficial transfer contract that simultaneously increases their profit and improves quality.     

Asylum Seekers in Scotland: The Accommodation of Diversity

This article explores the experiences of asylum seekers who have been housed in Glasgow under the government's dispersal policy. It notes the work of the Audit Commission in identifying those factors which may be considered when assessing the suitability of areas for asylum-seeker settlement. These factors are then discussed in detail in relation to the Glasgow case study, using information derived from interviews with asylum seekers themselves, with service providers and various community and voluntary organizations. The article notes the impact of additional factors such as media coverage, which were not considered by the Audit Commission. The article discusses the appropriateness of cities such as Glasgow, with relatively small minority ethnic populations, as locations for asylum-seeker settlement, and explores the impact of devolution. It concludes by suggesting that areas such as Glasgow may, with the appropriate commitment, become places where asylum seekers may successfully settle, once they have received refugee status, with new multicultural communities being created.     

Immigrant Occupational Mobility: Longitudinal Evidence from Spain

This article examines the occupational mobility of immigrants between their countries of origin and Spain on the basis of one of the few surveys available internationally with longitudinal information on immigrant employment in home and host countries. The evidence shows that the occupational status of immigrants in the Spanish labour market is, in general, substantially worse than in their countries of origin. The severe loss of occupational status experienced by immigrants is explained by the combined effect of the intense initial downgrading they experience when entering the Spanish labour market and their very slow occupational progress during their stay in Spain. These findings are more in line with the segmented assimilation theory, which suggests a limited or blocked immigrant occupational mobility, than with the assimilation theory, which predicts a U shaped evolution in the occupational status of immigrants between their home and host countries. As a result, the Spanish case contrasts sharply with previous evidence for other advanced countries, which tends to support the assimilation perspective. Finally, the empirical evidence suggests that one of the elements impeding the occupational mobility of immigrants in Spain is the significant size of the secondary segment of the labour market, which restricts immigrants’ opportunities mainly to low-status occupations.     

Retracted Article: The victorious counterrevolution: the nationalist effort in the Spanish Civil War

We, the Editors and Publisher of National Identities, have retracted the following book review:

Pedro García-Guirao (2019)

Book Review of The victorious counterrevolution: the nationalist effort in the Spanish Civil War. National Identities, published online on 14^th February 2019, DOI:10.1080/14608944.2018.1563986

The above-mentioned book review contained some inaccuracies in quotations and some statements which may be misleading as to the contents of the book. The book review was subsequently revised and re-published as DOI: 10.1080/14608944.2018.1563986

We have been informed in our decision-making by our policy on publishing ethics and integrity and the COPE guidelines on retractions.

The retracted article will remain online to maintain the scholarly record, but it will be digitally watermarked on each page as “Retracted”.     

Regularization with Maximum Entropy and Quantum Electrodynamics: The Merg(E) Estimators

It is well-known that under fairly conditions linear regression becomes a powerful statistical tool. In practice, however, some of these conditions are usually not satisfied and regression models become ill-posed, implying that the application of traditional estimation methods may lead to non-unique or highly unstable solutions. Addressing this issue, in this paper a new class of maximum entropy estimators suitable for dealing with ill-posed models, namely for the estimation of regression models with small samples sizes affected by collinearity and outliers, is introduced. The performance of the new estimators is illustrated through several simulation studies.     

Assessing the relevance of higher education courses

The establishment of the European Higher Education Area has involved specifying lists of professional competencies that programs are expected to develop, and with this the need for procedures to measure how every course within a higher education program is aligned with the program's competencies. We propose an instrument for characterizing this alignment, a process that we call assessing the relevance of a course. Using information from the course syllabus (objectives, contents and assessment scheme), our instrument produces indicators for characterizing the syllabus in terms of a competence list and for assessing its coherence. Because assessment involves quality, the results obtained can also be used to revise and improve the course syllabus. We illustrate this process with an example of a methods course from a mathematics teacher education program at a Spanish university.     

Effects of variations in water quantity and quality in the structure and functions of invertebrates’ community of a Mediterranean urban stream

Urban Ecosystems - Urban streams provide important ecosystem services to cities’ population, from the maintenance of urban biodiversity, temperature, humidity and air quality to improving...