FT data

Are NHS funds being diverted to the rich? Well, a bit…

May 24, 2012 6:48 pm by Sally Gainsbury

There has been speculation recently that the government is planning to divert millions of pounds in NHS funds from deprived urban areas in the north, to leafy, Conservative voting constituencies in the south.

This stems from health secretary Andrew Lansley’s recent comment that “age is the principal determinant of health need” and that distribution of the £100bn budget for the NHS in England should “get progressively to a greater focus on what are the actual determinants of health need.”

Somewhere along the line, those comments were interpreted by a generally cheesed-off medical profession that Mr Lansley intends to introduce an “age-only” NHS allocation formula, switching substantial NHS funds from, generally younger, Labour-voting constituencies in north to the octogenarians who thrive in the Conservative-voting villages of the south.

It’s a good story, which might even contain elements of the truth, but the reality, as ever, is a little more complicated.

At present, five separate allocation formulae are used to divvy up different bits of the £100bn NHS pot to different areas of England. The largest share – the hospital care budget – is divided up using one formula, while four others – mental health, GP prescribing, health inequalities (more on that in a later post) and maternity – are each allocated using their own separate formula. (Think for a second about the demographics driving the demand for maternity services as opposed to, say, hip replacements, and you will grasp why this makes sense.)

Health economists and statisticians frequently tweak and argue over these formula in order to move, hopefully, ever closer to the Holy Grail: a distribution of health resources which is fairly distributed on the basis of health need.

Continue reading: “Are NHS funds being diverted to the rich? Well, a bit…”

Tags: allocation formula, Andrew Lansley, Conservatives, healthcare, Labour, National Health Service, nhs, pork barrel, public policy
Posted in Damned lies and statistics, Economics, News nerds, NHS, Politics, polling and psephology, UK | Permalink

On grammar schools

May 21, 2012 11:50 am by Chris Cook

Grammar schools are a seductive idea: skim off high performing children at the age of 11 for education together. At the moment, there are 164 such schools in England, in a few counties which did not slough them off.

The excellent Mary Ann Sieghart says in today’s Indie:

…if you are bright but poor and you live in Kent, Essex, Buckinghamshire or Northern Ireland, your parentage doesn’t have to dictate your progress. You have nearly the same chance of becoming a cabinet minister, a judge, a newspaper editor or a top rower as your privately educated neighbour. Why is that? Because these areas still have grammar schools, those turbo-chargers of social mobility.

But I am afraid that is straightforwardedly untrue.

Here is the grade distribution of schools in Kent, London and England at large at GCSE. As ever, the poorest children, as defined by their postcodes, start at left. The richest children sit at the right. (I chose Kent just for its size and range of population.)

Continue reading: “On grammar schools”

Tags: Education, Efficiency, Equality, Kent, London, London schools, Mary Ann Sieghart, Quick and dirty, Social Mobility
Posted in Damned lies and statistics, Data Points, Education, UK | Permalink

Barometer poll shows business wary of Brics

May 18, 2012 10:32 am by Martin Stabe

With more than a year’s worth of of data from our exclusive business sentiment poll, the FT/Economist Global Business Barometer, now available, some interesting longitudinal patterns are becoming apparent for the first time.

Most notable among them is the steady erosion over the past year in executives’ perceptions of the “business friendliness” three of the world’s biggest developing economies, India, China and Brazil.

Continue reading: “Barometer poll shows business wary of Brics”

Posted in Brazil, Canada, China, Eurozone, France, Germany, India, Politics, polling and psephology, Russia, UK, United States | Permalink

Why plastics signal problems ahead for the US shale gas bonanza

May 17, 2012 9:29 am by FT

by guest contributor Paul Hodges

Shale gas developments in the US have sparked a wave of euphoria about the opportunity for a renaissance of its domestic manufacturing base. Petrochemicals should be one of the main beneficiaries, as the ethane produced from shale gas discoveries now provides the US with some of the cheapest feedstock in the world.

Major producers including Dow Chemicals, Shell and Chevron Phillips have already announced plans to build new ethane-based capacity. Others are likely to join them. Current estimates suggest total US ethylene capacity could therefore increase by 25 to 30 percent from today’s 27 million tonnes.

However, one key factor has the potential to spoil the story – much of this new capacity will need to be exported in the form of polyethylene (PE) and other major plastics. Yet as the chart shows, based on data from Global Trade Information Services, US net PE exports have actually been declining since 2010, even though its cost advantage from shale gas was increasing.

Continue reading: “Why plastics signal problems ahead for the US shale gas bonanza”

Tags: chemicals, shale gas, trade
Posted in Economics, News nerds | Permalink

Two thirds of deaths not counted

May 16, 2012 9:48 am by Emily Cadman

The latest World Health Organisation statistics report has thrown a light on the unglamorous but essential backbone of health policy – accurate death reporting.

According to the report, currently only 15 percent of the world’s population lives in a country where more than 90 percent of births and deaths are registered – and unsurprisingly most of these 34 countries are in Europe and the Americas.

It’s not surprising that war torn countries like Afghanistan might have had other concerns than registration data. But the list of countries without comprehensive data include major economic and population centres like China and India – both of whom use sample registration approaches. The full country by country list is on this pdf.

WHO region	No death registration data	Low quality	Medium quality	High quality	Number of WHO Member States
AFR	42	2	1	1	46
AMR	2	7	13	13	35
SEAR	7	4	0	0	11
EUR	2	11	24	16	53
EMR	9	10	2	0	21
WPR	12	4	7	4	27
Global	74	38	47	34	193

Continue reading: “Two thirds of deaths not counted”

Tags: malaria, registration, WHO
Posted in Damned lies and statistics | Permalink

From FT.com May 15, 2012

Green cars to drive down tax receipts

The rapid growth in greener, more fuel efficient vehicles will leave the Treasury with a £13bn shortfall in motoring taxes by the end of next decade, despite an anticipated 44 per cent jump in traffic.

The predictions from the Institute for Fiscal Studies, an independent think tank, are based on an analysis of the government’s own long-term forecasts, which show that by 2029 fuel duty will contribute 1.1 per cent of GDP, down from 1.7 per cent today. Vehicle excise duty will drop to 0.1 per cent from 0.3 per cent.

Receipts from the taxes total £38bn a year, equivalent to 7 per cent of all Treasury income.

The lost revenue is equivalent to increasing the basic rate of income tax from 20p to 23.4p, VAT from 20 per cent to 22.7 per cent or raising fuel duty by more than 50 per cent, according to the IFS report, published today.

Continue reading: “Green cars to drive down tax receipts”

Posted in News nerds | Permalink

Capital ideas on school reform

May 14, 2012 4:48 pm by Chris Cook

Earlier, I wrote a blogpost on the EEF’s interesting finding about 446 schools where the average of poorer pupils’ exam results were better than the national average for all children. Those schools certainly repay attention. As a first stab at this, there is one trend that becomes apparent from looking at their locations. One English region stands out:

Region	Comprehensives	High performers on EEF measure
North West	399	52
London	383	164
South East	368	56
West Midlands	330	39
East of England	301	48
Yorkshire and the Humber	282	17
South West	262	29
East Midlands	230	30
North East	152	11

Continue reading: “Capital ideas on school reform”

Tags: Becky Allen, Education, Education Endowment Foundation, EEF, Equality, Kevan Collins, Social Mobility, TES
Posted in Education, Statistics, UK | Permalink

How to spot successful schools

May 14, 2012 2:00 pm by Chris Cook

There has been a curious outbreak of maths in education policy discussion this week. This all started a fortnight ago when Kevan Collins, chief executive of the Education Endowment Foundation, put together a really interesting set of numbers in the TES.

He identified 446 schools where poor children, defined as those eligible for free school meals (FSM), were beating the national average for all children. This is a real core of excellent schools who are market-beaters, and excludes grammar schools. (For people who want to replicate the results in Stata, the necessary file is here.)

Here’s how that population of children within those 440 schools look like, alongside the whole school system graph, on what one civil servant affectionately calls my “Graph of Doom“ for 2010-11:

These are average GCSE points attained by each child – 8 points for an A* down to 1 point for a G. Poorest children, defined by the multiple deprivation score for their postcodes, are at left. Richest are at right. Zero on the y-axis is the national average (37.3 pts) and the units are standard deviations (22.0 pts).

Continue reading: “How to spot successful schools”

Tags: Becky Allen, Education, Education Endowment Foundation, EEF, Efficiency, Equality, Kevan Collins, Social Mobility
Posted in Data Points, Education, News nerds, On the records, UK | Permalink

From FT.com May 9, 2012

Immigrants help to raise average wages

Immigration has helped to raise average wages of most UK-born workers but held back wage growth for those at the most poorly paid end of the labour market, new study has shown.

Research published in the Review of Economic Studies examined the period between 1997 and 2005, when there was an increase in the foreign-born population equal to 3 per cent of the native population.

The authors – economists Christian Dustmann, Tommaso Frattini and Ian Preston – estimate that immigration depressed wages by 0.7p per hour at the 10th percentile, or the bottom layer, of UK-born workers.

But immigration contributed about 1.5p per hour to wage growth at the median and slightly more than 2p per hour at the 90th percentile.

Continue reading: “Immigrants help to raise average wages”

Posted in News nerds | Permalink