In spite of widespread expectations of improvements in living standards and health conditions, in most of the countries of the former Soviet bloc the transition to the market economy was accompanied by a sharp increase in (already high) death rates. Such an increase provoked an 'excess mortality' of some three million people over the period 1989-96 alone, an unprecedented phenomenon in peacetime. Such a crisis remains poorly explained, has generated a limited policy response in the countries concerned and international organizations, and is bound to generate important political and economic repercussions. This book is the first comprehensive assessment of the mortality crisis in transitional economies, of its causes, and of its remedies on the basis - among others - of micro data sets and quasi-panels on health trends which have never been used before. Contributions by demographers, economists, sociologists, epidemiologists, and health experts provide a rigorous analysis of the upsurge in mortality rates, with the aim of contributing to the launch of vigorous policies to tackle the crisis.

The emergence of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in late 2002 and 2003 challenged the global public health community to confront a novel epidemic that spread rapidly from its origins in southern China until it had reached more than 25 other countries within a matter of months. In addition to the number of patients infected with the SARS virus, the disease had profound economic and political repercussions in many of the affected regions. Recent reports of isolated new SARS cases and a fear that the disease could reemerge and spread have put public health officials on high alert for any indications of possible new outbreaks. This report examines the response to SARS by public health systems in individual countries, the biology of the SARS coronavirus and related coronaviruses in animals, the economic and political fallout of the SARS epidemic, quarantine law and other public health measures that apply to combating infectious diseases, and the role of international organizations and scientific cooperation in halting the spread of SARS. The report provides an illuminating survey of findings from the epidemic, along with an assessment of what might be needed in order to contain any future outbreaks of SARS or other emerging infections.

A New York Times Bestseller A Wall Street Journal Bestseller A New York Times Notable Book of 2020 A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Shortlisted for the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year A New Statesman Book to Read From economist Anne Case and Nobel Prize winner Angus Deaton, a groundbreaking account of how the flaws in capitalism are fatal for America's working class Deaths of despair from suicide, drug overdose, and alcoholism are rising dramatically in the United States, claiming hundreds of thousands of American lives. Anne Case and Angus Deaton explain the overwhelming surge in these deaths and shed light on the social and economic forces that are making life harder for the working class. As the college educated become healthier and wealthier, adults without a degree are literally dying from pain and despair. Case and Deaton tie the crisis to the weakening position of labor, the growing power of corporations, and a rapacious health-care sector that redistributes working-class wages into the pockets of the wealthy. This critically important book paints a troubling portrait of the American dream in decline, and provides solutions that can rein in capitalism's excesses and make it work for everyone.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the mortality crisis which affected Eastern Europe and the republics of the former USSR at the time of the transition to a market economy was arguably the major peacetime health crisis of recent decades. Chernobyl and the Mortality Crisis in Eastern Europe and the Old USSR discusses the importance of that crisis, surprisingly underplayed in the scientific literature, and presents evidence suggesting a potential role of the Chernobyl disaster among the causes contributing to it.

This book is about the crises of the world economy that have occurred from the 1970s to the present day. It makes the specific case that the global economy has experienced six crises during this 50-year period. Crises of the global economy are periods of substantial slowdown in world economic activity—as measured by investment, industrial production, trade, or unemployment—in which many national economies are technically in recession. To pose the existence of crises of the global economy implies that the world economy is a real entity with its own dynamics; it implies also that the usual approach that views national economies as the appropriate units of economic analysis has major limitations. The author provides data illustrating the global and regional manifestations of these crises of the world economy, elaborates on the concepts of world economy and economic crisis, and discusses the theories that have been used to explain them. The book shows how these recurrent global crises are discrete, countable phenomena, distinct states of an entity that can be appropriately referred to as the world or global economy, or world capitalism.

This timely book explores Russia's political development since the collapse of the USSR and how inextricably it has been bound up with economic change. Assessing the legacies of the Soviet period, leading scholars trace the evolution of Russia's political economy and how it may develop as bitter battles continue to be waged over property and state revenues, the development of private agriculture, and welfare. This book puts these domestic issues in international and comparative perspective by considering Russia's position in the global economy and its growing role as a major energy producer. Focusing especially on the nature and future of Russian capitalism, the contributors weigh the political problems that confront Russia in its ongoing struggle to modernize and develop its economy.