The purpose of this commentary article is to explain the causes and effects of the economic migration of health care workers from Poland to Western countries, and to analyse the impact of the migration of doctors and nurses on the functioning of the public health system. We use data from the National Central Statistical Office, our own preliminary research, social surveys and the Watch Health Care database. Domestic data are analysed and compared with trends in Western Europe as described in Eurostat and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development reports. The decreasing number of active physicians remaining in the health care system results in long waits for specialist appointments. The demand for doctors from Central and Eastern Europe will continue to grow. Consequently, there will be a further outflow of medical staff from Poland and other countries in the region and the current problems with access to health care will continue.

This article presents new evidence and analysis on age heaping—a proxy for numeracy and therefore for human capital—in New Spain during the Enlightenment. Human capital plays an important role in economic growth and welfare. It is also one of the dimensions of inequality. Our results are at odds with many of the usual assumptions on which most Mexicanist historiography is based. Age heaping levels of males and females and ethnic groups across locations in Central New Spain are estimated and compared through ad hoc indicators with other countries. We infer that a more empirical emphasis on the institutional legacy of the viceregal period and more attention to human capital since pre-Conquest times will benefit the progress of Hispanic American economic history.

In the Dutch health care system, health insurers negotiate with hospitals about the pricing of hospital products in a managed competition framework. In this paper, we study these contract prices that became for the first time publicly available in 2016. The data show substantive price variation between hospitals for the same products, and within a hospital for the same product across insurers. About 27% of the contract prices for a hospital product are at least 20% higher or lower than the average contract price in the market. For about half of the products, the highest and the lowest contract prices across hospitals differ by a factor of three or more. Moreover, hospital product prices do not follow a consistent ranking across hospitals, suggesting substantial cross-subsidization between hospital products. Potential explanations for the large and seemingly random price variation are: (i) different cost pricing methods used by hospitals, (ii) uncertainty due to frequent changes in the hospital payment system, (iii) price adjustments related to negotiated lumpsum payments and (iv) differences in hospital and insurer market power. Several policy options are discussed to reduce variation and increase transparency of hospital prices.

Total fertility in the Catholic countries of Southern Europe has dropped to remarkably low rates (=1.4) despite continuing low rates female labor force participation and high historic fertility. We model three ways in which religion affects the demand for children – through norms, market wages, and childrearing costs. We estimate these effects using new panel data on church attendance and clergy employment for 13 European countries from 1960 to 2000, spanning the Second Vatican Council (1962–65). Using nuns per capita as a proxy for service provision, we estimate fertility effects on the order of 300 to 400 children per nun. Moreover, nuns outperform priests as a predictor of fertility, suggesting that changes in childrearing costs dominate changes in theology and norms. Reduced church attendance also predicts fertility decline, but only for Catholics, not for Protestants. Service provision and attendance complement each other, a finding consistent with club models of religion.

The paper argues that in the early years field England has started a process of change from what is termed a ‘childcare discourse’ to a ‘pedagogical discourse’, the former representing a fragmented approach to services for children, the latter the sort of integrated and holistic approach to which the Every Child Matters policy aspires. It considers the experience of countries which have already made the turn to a pedagogical discourse, what this change might mean in the area of school-age provision and the barriers to England completing the process of change, which requires restructuring to be grounded in rethinking.