Despite its prominence in world finance, Japan's stock market has remained an enigma to many investors. This book aims to remove the mystery, revealing how Japanese corporations have moulded the market into a cheap source of capital; why most shares of corporations are held by other corporations; what the Keiretsu - secretive stockbroking, insurance and banking cartels - really do; and how the market's 1990 collapse affected these interlocking relationships.
In the United States, some populations suffer from far greater disparities in health than others. Those disparities are caused not only by fundamental differences in health status across segments of the population, but also because of inequities in factors that impact health status, so-called determinants of health. Only part of an individual's health status depends on his or her behavior and choice; community-wide problems like poverty, unemployment, poor education, inadequate housing, poor public transportation, interpersonal violence, and decaying neighborhoods also contribute to health inequities, as well as the historic and ongoing interplay of structures, policies, and norms that shape lives. When these factors are not optimal in a community, it does not mean they are intractable: such inequities can be mitigated by social policies that can shape health in powerful ways. Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity seeks to delineate the causes of and the solutions to health inequities in the United States. This report focuses on what communities can do to promote health equity, what actions are needed by the many and varied stakeholders that are part of communities or support them, as well as the root causes and structural barriers that need to be overcome.
Racial and ethnic disparities in health care are known to reflect access to care and other issues that arise from differing socioeconomic conditions. There is, however, increasing evidence that even after such differences are accounted for, race and ethnicity remain significant predictors of the quality of health care received. In Unequal Treatment, a panel of experts documents this evidence and explores how persons of color experience the health care environment. The book examines how disparities in treatment may arise in health care systems and looks at aspects of the clinical encounter that may contribute to such disparities. Patients' and providers' attitudes, expectations, and behavior are analyzed. How to intervene? Unequal Treatment offers recommendations for improvements in medical care financing, allocation of care, availability of language translation, community-based care, and other arenas. The committee highlights the potential of cross-cultural education to improve provider-patient communication and offers a detailed look at how to integrate cross-cultural learning within the health professions. The book concludes with recommendations for data collection and research initiatives. Unequal Treatment will be vitally important to health care policymakers, administrators, providers, educators, and students as well as advocates for people of color.
This edited volume brings together the perspectives of a diverse group of international scholars to explore the intersections of study abroad and social mobility. In doing so, it challenges universalist assumptions and power imbalances implicit in study abroad across the Global North and South, and explores the implications of COVID-19 for equity within study abroad programs, policy, and practice going forward. Offering empirical, theoretical, and conceptual contributions, Critical Perspectives on Equity and Social Mobility in Study Abroad foregrounds critical reflection on the stratification of access to study abroad and examines the varied outcomes of international study in relation to graduates’ entry into domestic and international labor markets. Focusing on the experiences and outcomes of students from varied backgrounds, chapters identify a number of power imbalances relating to student race, ethnicity, religion, local and international policies and politics, and put forward valuable recommendations to ensure greater equity within the field. Against the backdrop of growing criticism over the power imbalances in international exchange, this text will benefit researchers, academics, and educators with an interest in higher education, international and comparative education, and multicultural education. Those interested in educational policy and the sociology of education more broadly will also benefit from this book.
Attempting to explain increased income inequality and decreased productivity growth, this book considers distribution not just in terms of income but also in terms of education and health care: two long-term determinants of income. Reviewing partial explanations, it notes the conflict between claims of rapid technological change and decreased productivity growth and shows the limited impact of policies affecting income redistribution. Although education and health care have become more equally distributed, the work notes, higher educational attainment has had a minimal effect on occupational distribution, and with improved access to medical care, the disparity between the health of the poor and the rest of the population has not decreased. In conclusion, the work notes that attitudes toward income inequality differ from attitudes toward inequality in education and health care. Attitudes toward income inequalty accept a floor but no ceiling; whereas equal access to education, qualified by ability, and access to health care based on need are generally accepted.
Since the early 1980s, private equity investors have heralded and shepherded massive changes in American capitalism. From outsourcing to excessive debt taking, private equity investment helped normalize once-taboo business strategies while growing into an over $3 trillion industry in control of thousands of companies and millions of workers. Daniel Scott Souleles opens a window into the rarefied world of private equity investing through ethnographic fieldwork on private equity financiers. Songs of Profit, Songs of Loss documents how and why investors buy, manage, and sell the companies that they do; presents the ins and outs of private equity deals, management, and valuation; and explains the historical context that gave rise to private equity and other forms of investor-led capitalism. In addition to providing invaluable ethnographic insight, Songs of Profit, Songs of Loss is also an anthropological study of inequality as Souleles connects the core components of financial capitalism to economic disparities. Souleles uses local ideas of "value" and "time" to frame the ways private equity investors comprehend their work and to show how they justify the prosperity and poverty they create. Throughout, Souleles argues that understanding private equity investors as contrasted with others in society writ large is essential to fully understanding private equity within the larger context of capitalism in the United States.
Inequality of opportunity, both within and among nations, sustains extreme deprivation, results in wasted human potential and often weakens prospects for overall prosperity and economic growth, concludes the 2006 World Development Report. To correct this situation and reduce poverty more effectively, Equity and Development recommends ensuring more equitable access by the poor to health care, education, jobs, capital, and secure land rights, among others. It also calls for greater equality of access to political freedoms and political power, breaking down stereotyping and discrimination, and improving access by the poor to justice systems and infrastructure. To level the playing field among countries, and thereby reduce global inequities that hurt the poor in developing countries, the report calls for removal of trade barriers in rich countries, flexibility to allow greater in-migration of lower-skilled people from developing countries, and increased -- and more effective -- development assistance.
