IN RE BILSKI案：确定专利标的物的新动向

在美国道富银行信托有限公司诉Signature金融集团有限公司一案中,联邦巡回法院对<美国法典>第35章第101条1进行了解释,并对三个最高法院案例进行了解释,将适用于专利的标的物范围扩展到包含任何能产生实用性、有型性和实体性成果的发明.然而,去年,该法院在Bilski一案中却根据相同法律和案例却做出了非常不同的判决,把可申请专利的"程序"限定于依附于特定机械或设施的程序,或将某一物品转化为其它状态或物品的过程.In re Bilski一案的判决标志着近十年来美国法律将专利标的物范围扩展到包含任何能产生实用性、有型性和实体性成果的发明的趋势之终结.     

New Vision for Old Ties

On the 40th anniversary of the normalization of China -U.S. diplomatic relations, a diverse group of diplomats, athletes, entrepreneurs and economists has advocated a more creative approach to resolving trade tension between the two largest economies in the world, with the bottom line that the bilateral relationship had endured in the past and would continue to do so in today's era of greater engagement.     

Health care and the labor market: learning from the German experience

Many observers have begun to question the U.S. reliance on an employment-based private health insurance system. In thinking about the future of this system, it is instructive to examine the German experience. The German health insurance system is almost entirely organized and financed around the labor market. In recent years, the German labor market has changed in several ways. Among other changes, more German women now work, the proportion of retirees in the population has increased, the share of manufacturing in employment has declined, and the economy has become more open. These labor market changes have made it more difficult to organize health insurance around employment in Germany. Recent changes in the German health insurance system have, to some extent, decoupled health insurance from employment. This decoupling is likely to continue as the labor market changes further. We explore the implications of this experience for the United States.     

Modeling health insurance expansions: effects of alternate approaches.

Estimates of the costs and consequences of many types of public policy proposals play an important role in the development and adoption of particular policy programs. Estimates of the same, or similar, policies that employ different modeling approaches can yield widely divergent results. Such divergence often undermines effective policymaking. These problems are particularly prominent for health insurance expansion programs. Concern focuses on predictions of the numbers of individuals who will be insured and the costs of the proposals. Several different simulation-modeling approaches are used to predict these effects, making the predictions difficult to compare. This paper categorizes and describes the different approaches used; explains the conceptual and theoretical relationships between the methods; demonstrates empirically an example of the (quite restrictive) conditions under which all approaches can yield quantitatively identical predictions; and empirically demonstrates conditions under which the approaches diverge and the quantitative extent of that divergence. All modeling approaches implicitly make assumptions about functional form that impose restrictions on unobservable heterogeneity. Those assumptions can dramatically affect the quantitative predictions made.