Population-normalized indicators (e.g., GDP per capita), under the assumption of the indicators scaling linearly with population, are ubiquitously used in national development performance comparison. This assumption, however, is not valid because it may ignore agglomeration effect resulting from nonlinear interactions in socioeconomic systems. Here, we present extensive empirical evidence showing the sub-linear scaling rather than the presumed linear scaling between population and multiple indicators of national development performance. We then develop a theoretical framework based on the scaling rule observed in cities to explore the origin of scaling in countries. Finally, we demonstrate that urbanization plays a pivotal role in transforming national development from limited sub-linear growth to unlimited super-linear growth. This underscores the significance of urbanization in achieving sustained growth and elevating human living standards at the national level. Our findings have the potential to inform policies aimed at promoting equitable inter-country comparison and achieving sustainable development in countries.

Livestock provide meat, milk, draught labour, are used for breeding, and act as a store of value for smallholder farmers. High young stock mortality (YSM) has the potential to cause significant financial loss. The Young Stock Mortality Reduction Consortium collaborated on a project to deliver a package of basic health and husbandry interventions to reduce YSM for cattle and small ruminants in mixed and pastoral production systems in Ethiopia. Prior to the intervention, YSM rates ranged from 9.8% for calves in mixed systems, to 35.6% for small ruminants in pastoral systems. Proportional reductions YSM from the intervention ranged from 60% for calves and for small ruminants in mixed systems, to 72% for calves in pastoral systems. This brief research report assesses the costs and benefits of the intervention ex-poste to determine its efficiency. NPVs for the intervention (per household) were calculated for a range of benefit periods (from 1 to 20 years), based on the cost of training enumerators and farmers and the net annual household benefits realised within each benefit period. We found in both pastoral and mixed systems the net annual household benefit for the intervention was positive. For pastoral households the intervention achieves a positive NPV after 2 years. For mixed households the intervention achieves a positive NPV after 11 years. Overall, we found the benefits of the intervention exceed the costs, by a very large amount in pastoral systems, and that benefits were larger for households that kept larger numbers of breeding females.

In the United Kingdom, demand on the social care sector is rising coupled with a significant reduction in funding making it difficult to meet these needs. The aim of this two-part commentary is to provide a critical evaluation of the evidence base in relation to solutions to tackle the growing demands on health and social care. Part 1 focuses on the evidence from a systematic review around the association between the availability and supply of social care and healthcare on utilisation for older adults in high income countries.
UNASSIGNED: An evidence summary based on the following systematic review:Spiers G, Matthews FE, Moffatt S, Barker RO, Jarvis H, Stow D, Kingston A, Hanratty B (2019) Impact of social care supply on healthcare utilisation by older adults: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Age and Ageing 48(1):57-66. https://doi.org/10.1093/ageing/afy147.

This study proposes a directed acyclic graph (DAG)-based framework for generalized variance decomposition for investigating the heterogeneous return spillovers in financial system and measuring the systemic importance of financial institutions among 34 listed Chinese financial institutions from 2011 to 2023. Findings indicate pronounced information spillovers among institutions within the same sector due to contemporaneous causal relationships. Both static and dynamic financial network analyses highlight the significance of the securities sector. Dynamic structural characteristics align with macroeconomic development and are sensitive to internal and external shocks. Systemic importance assessment reveals that market size alone doesn\'t determine importance, with notable disparities between banking and non-banking sectors. State-owned and joint-stock commercial banks play a vital role in banking, while local government and private capital-controlled institutions are crucial in the securities sector. This research aids regulatory efforts in maintaining a balanced regulatory environment, ensuring market efficiency, and reducing operational costs.

UNASSIGNED: Artemisia annua (AA), used as a growth promoter in poultry, lowers feed costs and enhances economic efficiency. This study aimed to assess the impact of varying AA concentrations on broiler chicken growth, gene expression, and profitability.
UNASSIGNED: Two hundred 1-day-old male Cobb chicks were randomly allocated into four treatment groups, each containing five replicates and 10 birds. The experimental groups consisted of G1 (basal diet), G2 (basal diet with 0.3% AA), G3 (basal diet with 0.6% AA), and G4 (basal diet with 0.9% AA). The birds had continuous access to feed and water throughout the study. The experiment lasted for 42 days. We measured the growth performance (Feed intake, Life weight), carcass traits (weight after slaughter, dressed carcass, heart, gizzard, spleen, giblet and thymus weight), liver and spleen antioxidants (CAT, GSH, SOD), and gene expression of anti-inflammatory and immune- related genes.
UNASSIGNED: The primary findings revealed that the addition of 0.6% AA had a positive impact (p < 0.05) on all investigated variables compared with the control and other groups. Dietary supplementation with 0.6% AA led to increased breast, giblet, skeleton, and total yield, and net return compared with the control group. Supplementation with AA exhibited antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, and immunological effects through improved levels of antioxidant superoxide dismutase (SOD), catalase (CAT), and glutathione peroxidase (GSH-Px) in tissue homogenates of the liver and spleen. It also upregulated the relative messenger RNA levels of anti-inflammatory interleukin (IL)-10, SOD, CAT, and GSH-Px, whereas IL-1β and tumor necrosis factor-alpha were downregulated.
UNASSIGNED: The study found that AA is a promising replacement for antibiotics in poultry farming as a growth promoter for chickens. 0.6% AA in the broiler diet yielded the best results, striking a balance between superior performance and robust economic benefits.

To detect and respond to emerging diseases more effectively, an integrated surveillance strategy needs to be applied to both human and animal health. Current programs in Asian countries operate separately for the two sectors and are principally concerned with detection of events that represent a short-term disease threat. It is not realistic to either invest only in efforts to detect emerging diseases, or to rely solely on event-based surveillance. A comprehensive strategy is needed, concurrently investigating and managing endemic zoonoses, studying evolving diseases which change their character and importance due to influences such as demographic and climatic change, and enhancing understanding of factors which are likely to influence the emergence of new pathogens. This requires utilisation of additional investigation tools that have become available in recent years but are not yet being used to full effect. As yet there is no fully formed blueprint that can be applied in Asian countries. Hence a three-step pathway is proposed to move towards the goal of comprehensive One Health disease surveillance and response.

UNASSIGNED: Intensive care unit (ICU) cost estimates are critical to achieving healthcare system efficiency and sustainability. We aimed to review the published literature describing ICU costs in Australia.
UNASSIGNED: A systematic review was conducted to identify studies that estimated the cost of ICU care in Australia. Studies conducted in specific patient cohorts or on specific treatments were excluded.
UNASSIGNED: Relevant studies were sourced from a previously published review (1970-2016), a systematic search of MEDLINE and EMBASE (2016-5 May 2023), and reference checking.
UNASSIGNED: A tool was developed to assess study quality and risk of bias (maximum score 57/57). Total and component costs were tabulated and indexed to 2022 Australian Dollars. Costing methodologies and study quality assessments were summarised.
UNASSIGNED: Six costing studies met the inclusion criteria. Study quality scores were low (15/41 to 35/47). Most studies were conducted only in tertiary metropolitan public ICUs; sample sizes ranged from 100 to 10,204 patients. One study used data collected within the past 10 years. Mean daily ICU costs ranged from $966 to $5381 and mean total ICU admission costs $4888 to $14,606. Three studies used a top-down costing approach, deriving cost estimates from budget reports. The other three studies used both bottom-up and top-down costing approaches. Bottom-up approaches collected individual patient resource use.
UNASSIGNED: Available ICU cost estimates are largely outdated and lack granular data. Future research is needed to estimate ICU costs that better reflect current practice and patient complexity and to determine the best methods for generating these estimates.

Maintaining reliable energy supplies with resilience to extreme weather, water shortage and rising electricity and cooling demand is crucial to successfully implementing the clean energy transition. The integrated power and water systems found in several hyper-arid countries, featuring cooling-driven electrical demand and near-total dependence on seawater desalination, offer case studies illustrating energy system robustness to these conditions. We use linear optimization to minimize costs in a model system based on the resiliency-oriented energy system of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) while progressively decarbonizing the energy mix. We demonstrate that high levels of renewable energy adoption are economically favorable under conservative future technology cost assumptions, even including strict resiliency requirements, and draw conclusions for other energy systems making the transition to renewable energy under challenging climatic conditions, especially regarding the role of water desalination, demand flexibility, energy storage, and suitability of conventional design rules for ensuring resilience in renewable-dominated systems.

BACKGROUND: Adherence to TB drugs is crucial for improving treatment outcomes. Digital adherence technologies can improve adherence; however, there is a lack of evidence on cost-effectiveness. This study aimed to explore the cost-effectiveness of medication event reminder monitors (MERM) in China compared with the standard of care, using results from a pragmatic, cluster-randomised superiority trial of an electronic MERM in China.
METHODS: We collected primary unit cost data from the societal perspective, both at and above the health facility level. We estimated the incremental cost-effectiveness of MERM using a Markov model with a 20-year time horizon; a 3% discount rate was applied to costs and outcomes. We explored uncertainty through a series of sensitivity and scenario analyses.
RESULTS: The incremental cost of MERM was $27.22 per patient. Probabilistic sensitivity analysis showed significant uncertainty about the intervention\'s cost-effectiveness. Changing assumptions around key parameters substantially affected our estimated incremental cost-effectiveness ratio.
CONCLUSIONS: Although the incremental cost of the MERM box was low, current evidence does not indicate that the intervention would be cost-effective. However, the intervention\'s cost-effectiveness could improve if implemented as part of a broader strategy, including enhanced patient management.
BACKGROUND: Il est crucial de respecter les médicaments antituberculeux pour améliorer les résultats du traitement. Les technologies numériques peuvent améliorer l\'observance, mais il existe un manque de preuves sur leur rapport coût-efficacité. Cette étude a examiné le rapport coût-efficacité des moniteurs de rappel d\'événements médicamenteux (MERM, pour l’anglais, « medication event reminder monitors ») en Chine par rapport aux soins standards, en se basant sur les résultats d\'un essai pragmatique randomisé en grappes d\'un MERM électronique en Chine.
UNASSIGNED: Les coûts unitaires primaires du point de vue de la société ont été collectés et analysés à la fois au niveau de l\'établissement de santé et au-delà. Pour évaluer le rapport coût-efficacité différentiel du MERM, nous avons utilisé un modèle de Markov sur une période de 20 ans, en appliquant un taux d\'actualisation de 3% aux coûts et aux résultats. Afin de prendre en compte les incertitudes, nous avons effectué plusieurs analyses de sensibilité et de scénarios.
UNASSIGNED: Le coût supplémentaire du MERM s\'élevait à 27,22 $ par patient. L\'analyse de sensibilité probabiliste a révélé une incertitude importante concernant le rapport coût-efficacité de l\'intervention. La variation des hypothèses liées aux paramètres clés a eu un impact significatif sur le rapport coût-efficacité différentiel estimé.
CONCLUSIONS: Bien que le coût différentiel de la boîte MERM soit faible, les données actuelles n\'indiquent pas que l\'intervention serait rentable. Toutefois, le rapport coût-efficacité de l\'intervention pourrait être amélioré si elle était mise en œuvre dans le cadre d\'une stratégie plus large, comprenant une meilleure prise en charge des patients.

The nexus between environmental pollution (EP) and technological innovation is crucial for achieving sustainable development. However, existing literature has paid less attention to the new form of high-quality innovation (HI) in environmental management. This paper uses panel data from 31 Chinese provinces from 2008 to 2020, employing the two-stage least squares method to investigate the relationship between HI and EP. The empirical results reveal that HI can effectively reduce the EP, which holds after multiple robustness tests, and this effect is more obvious in southern China. Meanwhile, HI drives clean and efficient energy transition and decreases EP. Moreover, increased environmental regulation weakens the influence of HI on EP. The major contributions of this study are constructing an HI index including innovation, human capital, and government support and examining its influence on EP in China. The findings encourage government to implement policies of innovation-driven transformation, energy conservation and emissions reduction.