Browsing by Issue Date, starting with "2003-08"
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- Os trabalhadores moçambicanos na antiga República Democrática Alemã : passado e presentePublication . Oppeinheimer, JochenFor more than ten years, from 1979 until the end of the German Democratic Republic in 1990, the Government of Mozambique maintained a migration of thousands of workers to East Germany. The main, although hidden, purpose of this migration was the servicing of the increasingly unsustainable debt incurred with the GDR. In many respects this migration was similar to the employment of Mozambican miners in South Africa during the colonial period: a paternalistic legal and institutional framework, employment of single youths on a rotating basis, deferred payment, housing and social segregation in the host country. The implosion of the GDR lead to a hasty repatriation of the Mozambican workers and to an open conflict between the returnees and the Government concerning wage and social security transfers for which the workers feel wronged. To voice their claims they take advantage of the newly established civil liberties and democratic institutions in Mozambique. This article assesses this largely ignored phenomenon of contemporary migration by drawing upon some untapped primary sources, less accessible secondary material and interviews, both in Germany and in Mozambique. It may equally contribute to clarify some contentious issues in the ongoing conflict.
- Optimal payment schemes for physiciansPublication . Levaggi, Rosella; Rochaix, LiseIncreasingly, physicians’ payment schemes are being reformed to en- hance performance and to ensure an optimal allocation of scarce medical resources. The empirical evidence points towards the use of mixed payment schemes that appear better at achieving efficiency than either lump sum payments (such as cap- itation) or piece rates (fee for service). Yet, this alleged superiority remains to be established from a theoretical standpoint. The Principal-Agent model developed in this paper offers a contribution in this line, with a primary care physician as agent and a public regulator as principal. Alternative specifications of the princi- pal’s objective function are considered in the model (efficiency versus fairness). Uncertainty is introduced by two random variables that represent the probability for an individual of being ill and his productivity parameter which determines the amount of resources (the physician’s effort in particular) necessary to restore health. The relationship is characterised by information asymmetry since the physician is assumed to observe both variables after the contract has been signed, but before choosing his effort level. Both selection and moral hazard issues are addressed in the model and the results show that, under GP risk neutrality, mixed payment schemes fully correct for both types of information asymmetry.
- Treatment effects of selection behavior in managed care plans : evidence from MedicaidPublication . Gomes, Carla S.This paper tests whether capitated payments to Medicaid managed care plans induce to plans’ strategic undercutting of treatment for specific diagnostic groups. I focus on treatment (measured by length of stay and cost) in acute care hospitals in Massachusetts. I use a “differences-in-differences-in-differences” ap- proach, where the third differences compare treatment patterns between managed care plans that receive capitated payments with those that do not. I find that the first reduce treatment significantly more to mental health patients than to patients in other disease groups, whereas the latter reduce hospital resource use more uniformly across disease groups. These results highlight the importance of using payment mechanisms in public programs that reflect the variability in costs of beneficiaries.
- The economics of crowd out under mixed public/private health insurancePublication . Encinosa, WilliamIt is well known that public insurance sometimes crowds out private insurance. Yet, the economic theory of crowd out has remained unstudied. Here, I show that crowd out causes two countervailing effects: (a) the intensive margin effect–since high demanders are crowded out, the private market now has a larger proportion of low demanders on the intensive margin (The intensive margin are those who have already bought private insurance), and so will drop quality to lower the price to the low demanders’ liking; and (b) the extensive margin effect–before the public insurance expansion, the private sector had lowered quality to make insurance more affordable at the extensive margin (The extensive margin is the next group of people who would buy private insurance if the price decreased), but now that public insurance crowds out the extensive margin, quality can then be raised back up to the high demanders’ liking. If the extensive margin effect dominates, then a new phenomenon of push out occurs, in which crowd out causes the private sector to raise quality and to increase the number of uninsured low demanders not eligible for public insurance. If the intensive margin effect dominates, then crowd out will cause the private sector to lower quality, causing the phenomenon of crowd-in, in which the number of uninsured low demanders that take-up private insurance increases. These two countervailing effects have important implications for any government policy that desires to eradicate all uninsurance. First, if push out is dominant, then the private sector will respond to the public insurance by pushing out and leaving some people newly uninsured. If crowd-in is dominant, then all people can be insured and the government can do it at a lower-than-anticipated level of expansion due to the private sector crowding in.
- Calendário venatório para aquáticas. Por que é que se deve cumpri-lo ?Publication . Fabião, António; Rodrigues, David; Figueiredo, Maria
- Interacções sociais e a apropriação de conhecimentos - Sumário pormenorizado da lição síntesePublication . César, MargaridaA lição sintetizada neste sumário tem como finalidade principal a apresentação e discussão de uma abordagem interpretativa dos fenómenos relacionais: a Psicologia Social da Apropriação do Conhecimento. Esta abordagem está concebida como uma ferramenta mental (Vygotsky, 1962, 1978) para a compreensão de uma situação complexa: as interacções sociais estabelecidas na sala de aula e o papel que elas desempenham no processo de apropriação de conhecimentos e de mobilização de competências. Nas últimas três décadas a importância das interacções sociais estabelecidas na sala de aula, enquanto elemento mediador da apropriação de conhecimentos e mobilização de competências, tem sido salientada por muitos autores. Após cerca de 30 anos de percurso, é interessante voltar um pouco às origens e reflectir sobre os contributos dados pelos autores que serviram de base à formação de um novo quadro de referência teórico: Piaget e Vygotsky. Pretendemos fazê-lo de uma forma dinâmica, assinalando as modificações que os constructos foram sofrendo à medida que a investigação foi progredindo e que o quadro de referência teórico da Psicologia Social da Apropriação do Conhecimento se foi clarificando.
- Low Complexity Byzantine-Resilient ConsensusPublication . Correia, Miguel; Neves, Nuno Ferreira; Lung, Lau Cheuk; Veríssimo, PauloThe application of the tolerance paradigm to security intrusion tolerance has been raising a good deal of attention in the dependability and security communities. This paper is concerned with a novel approach to intrusion tolerance. The idea is to use privileged distributed components generically designated by wormholes to support the execution of intrusion-tolerant protocols, often called Byzantine-resilient protocols in the literature. The paper introduces the design of wormhole-aware intrusion-tolerant protocols using a classical distributed systems problem: consensus. The system where the consensus protocol runs is mostly asynchronous and can fail in an arbitrary way, except for the wormhole, which is secure and synchronous. Using the wormhole to execute a few critical steps, the protocol manages to have a low time complexity: in the best case, it runs in a single round, even if some processes are malicious. The protocol is also arguably faster than classical Byzantine protocols, because it does not use public-key cryptography in runtime. The protocol has the interesting feature of not being bound by the FLP impossibility result