BackgroundChina has become the world‘s second largest healthcare market based on a recent report by the World Health Organization. Eventhough China achieved universal health insurance coverage in 2011, representing the largest expansion of insurance coverage in human history achieved; health inequality remains endemic in China. Lessons from the effect of market crisis on health equity in Europe and other places has reignited interest in exploring the potential healthcare market aberrations that can trigger distributive injustice in healthcare resource allocation among China’s provinces. Recently, many healthcare investors in China have become more concerned about capital preservation, and are responding by abandoning long term investments strategies in healthcare. This investment withdrawal en mass is perceived to be influenced by herding tendencies and can trigger or consolidate endemic health inequality.MethodsOur study simultaneously employs four testing models (two state spaced models and two return dispersion models) to establish the existence of procyclical (herding) behavior among the stocks and its health equity implications. These are applied to a large set of data to compare and contrast results of herd formation among investors in fourteen healthcare sectors in China.ResultsThe study reveals that apart from the cross sectional standard deviation (CSSD) model, the remaining two models and our augmented state space model yields significant evidence of herding in all subsectors of the healthcare market. We also find that the herding effect is more prominent during down movements of the market.ConclusionHerding behavior may lead to contemporaneous loss of investor confidence and capital withdrawal and thereby deprive the healthcare sector of the much needed capital for expansion. Thus there may be obvious delay in efforts to bridge the gap in access to healthcare facilities, medical support services, medical supplies, pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, diagnostic substances, medical laboratory and advanced medical equipment across China. Moreover, a potential crash in the healthcare market is possible in the healthcare sector as a result of persistent herding tendencies among investors and that may have more damaging consequences for health inequality in China.

This study analyzes the relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and company's profitability (CP) in Ghana with the utilization of mixed data, obtained from sixteen ( 16) firms' audited annual report and financial statements between "2005-2014", filed with the Ghana stock Exchange (GSE) and Register General of companies. We use lagged data from the Ghana Investment Promotion Centre (GIPC) to establish the relationship between CP and CSR. In addition 850 questionnaires were administered to the public for CSR level of awareness data. The data collected are being analyzed by the use of Ordinary Least Square (OLS) for the study. Results from the analysis demonstrated that the selected companies have contributed below ten percent of their yearly profit to support social responsibility programmes. The co-efficient of determination of the findings demonstrates the extracts that the logical variable account for changes or varieties in chosen companies' profits after tax (PAT) are brought about by changes in corporate social responsibility (CSR) in Ghana. It is then prescribes that regulations and laws to commit companies' to be apparent, satisfactory consideration ought to be given to social accounting regarding social cost and to agree to the establishment of corporate social responsibility.

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Early accounts of the development of modern medicine suggest that the clinical skills, scientific competence, and doctors' judgment were the main impetus for treatment decision, diagnosis, prognosis, therapy assessment, and medical progress. Yet, clinician judgment has its own critics and is sometimes harshly described as notoriously fallacious and an irrational and unfathomable black box with little transparency. With the rise of contemporary medical research, the reputation of clinician judgment has undergone significant reformation in the last century as its fallacious aspects are increasingly emphasized relative to the evidence based options. Within the last decade, however, medical forecasting literature has seen tremendous change and new understanding is emerging on best ways of sharing medical information to complement the evidence based medicine practices. This review revisits and highlights the core debate on clinical judgments and its interrelations with evidence based medicine. It outlines the key empirical results of clinician judgments relative to evidence based models and identifies its key strengths and prospects, the key limitations and conditions for the effective use of clinician judgment, and the extent to which it can be optimized and professionalized for medical use.