In this way, the designation of the resource as health or non-health, even if arbitrary, can still inform policy. Everyone will have a common expectation of whether consumption of a particular resource will be routinely counted as a health expenditure or not, and can then make the necessary adjustments depending on the nature of their policy concerns. A health expenditure is a consumption of a resource with the primary objective of promoting, restoring, and maintaining health. National or total health expenditure is the monetary representation of the totality of resources being consumed within the health system for a given year.
Worryingly, though, the rate of increase in the index has started to come off, presaging a peaking of the upward momentum in world trade. Container shortages, increased port turnover time and three major shipping alliances controlling much of the supplies have resulted in a jump in freight rates putting the sustainability of the global trade expansion at risk. To gauge the level of goods to be produced in the future , economists look at a statistic called average weekly manufacturing hours. This measure tells us the average number of hours worked per week by production workers in manufacturing industries. For assessing the strength of the housing market, building permits is often a good indicator.
The information on resources consumed is best reported within a formal accounting framework. Health expenditure in any country depends on a mix of social, economic, and political factors and there is no ‘right’ amount to spend on health. Among western countries, the United States spends approximately 15% of GDP on health, compared with 9–10% in Western European countries and somewhat less (7–8%) in poorer OECD states such as the former Soviet states and satellites. These amounts have grown significantly over the last two decades and a number of commentators question the sustainability of these trends. In this entry of the encyclopedia, statistical methods for analyzing health economic data are reviewed. The second section focuses specifically on issues relating to the analysis and testing of cost data, including issues related to nonnormality of the data, censoring of cost-data and other forms of missingness.
From there we can begin to look at the reasons why the cycles took place, which could be government policy, consumer behavior, or international phenomena among other things. Hence, we can determine which foreign countries are economically strong or weak. Governments turn to macroeconomics when budgeting spending, creating taxes, deciding on interest rates, and making policy decisions.
Thus, the measurement of the unemployment rate requires the measurement of both employment and unemployment. When household income increases, household spending usually increases as well. The amount of extra consumption for an extra dollar of income is called the marginal propensity to consume . Consistent with classical unemployment theory, frictional unemployment occurs when appropriate job vacancies exist for a worker, but the length of time needed to search for and find the job leads to a period of unemployment. Employees subject to seasonal unemployment include retail workers hired for the holiday shopping season, lettuce pickers in California, and restaurant employees in ski country during the summer.
The total amount of additional GDP can be calculated using the simple multiplier . In this example, the multiplier is 5 (that is, 1/(1–0.8)), such that the initial $10 million investment results in $50 million in additional GDP. Economists usually favor monetary over fiscal policy because it has two major advantages. First, alien tape reviews monetary policy is generally implemented by independent central banks instead of the political institutions that control fiscal policy. Independent central banks are less likely to make decisions based on political motives. Second, monetary policy suffers shorter inside lags and outside lags than fiscal policy.