THE WELFARE COSTS OF SUPPLY RESTRICTIONS IN THE GENERAL PRACTICE LABOUR MARKET

Abstract: This paper examines policy arguments for further restricting supply to the Australian General Practice profession by immigration and medical school policies. It uses economic analysis to assess the costs and benefits of supply restrictions. The effects of Medicare and GP income-targeting on policy design are analysed. Restrictions are shown to impose net costs on the community as a whole and on government. Even with Medicare subsidies, the inefficiency costs of the current health system are minimised with liberal policies for accepting foreign- trained GPs.     

The Cost of Discrimination in Latin America

Indigenous and linguistic minorities are in an inferior economic and social position. The ethnic concentration of inequality is increasingly being recognized in the literature. In this review, studies from six Latin American countries that estimate the costs to an individual of being an economic minority are reviewed. The studies decompose the overall earnings gap into two components. One is the portion attributable to differences in the endowments of income-generating characteristics (“explained” differences) and the other is attributable to differences in the returns that majority and minority workers receive for the same endowment of income-generating characteristics (“unexplained”). This latter component is often taken as reflecting the “upper bound” of wage discrimination. In two studies for Bolivia, one using a 1966 survey and the other a 1989 survey, decomposition of the differential between indigenous and nonindigenous earnings leads to the conclusion that most of the overall differential is due to productivity. In Guatemala, Mexico and Peru, only one-half of the earnings differential can be attributed to differences in productivity-enhancing characteristics. In Paraguay, decomposition of the overall earnings differential between monolingual Spanish speakers and Guaraní speakers shows that most of the differential is explained by human capital differences. In Brazil, however, there is a significant cost to “being non-white.” Harry Anthony Patrinos is a Senior Education Economist at the World Bank. He leads the Economics of Education Thematic Group and manages EdInvest (www.worldbank.org/edinvest), the Education Investment Information Facility. He is co-author ofDecentralization of Education: Demand-Side Financing (1997). His latest co-edited book isPolicy Analysis of Child Labor: A Comparative Study (St. Martin's Press, 1999).Indigenous People and Poverty in Latin America: An Empirical Analysis (edited with George Psacharopoulos), was one of the first studies of the socioeconomic situation of indigenous peoples in Latin America.     

Criminals' explanations of their criminal behavior, III: the effects of time and context

The authors looked at the explanations for their index of violent crimes as given by 69 incarcerated violent male offenders, respectively. We then examined the extent to which those explanations changed with the passing of time and with change in context. We found that explanations of impaired internal control increased with the passing of time, and that such explanation was given more often to mental health professionals rather than law enforcement professionals. Finally, we found that our subjects tended to give mental health professionals fewer explanations involving external control with the passing of time.