This paper studies changes in the patterns of drug consumption and attitudes towards drugs in relation to sky-high (youth) unemployment rates brought about by the Great Recession. Our analysis is based on data for 28 European countries that refer to young people. We find that the consumption of cannabis and 'new substances' is positively related to increasing unemployment rates. An increase of 1% in the regional unemployment rate is associated with an increase of 0.7 percentage points in the ratio of young people who state that they have consumed cannabis at some point in time. Our findings also indicate that higher unemployment may be associated with more young people perceiving that access to drugs has become more difficult, particularly access to ecstasy, cocaine and heroin. According to young Europeans, when the economy worsens, anti-drug policies should focus on the reduction of poverty and unemployment, and not on implementing tougher measures against users.

Este trabalho analisa o impacto da condição de migração dos pais sobre a probabilidade de trabalhar/estudar dos filhos entre 10 e 14 anos no estado de São Paulo. Com base em uma tipologia familiar estabelecida de acordo com as combinações da condição de migração de pais e mães, estimamos um probit bivariado para meninos e meninas. As diferenças das probabilidades encontradas e decompostas através do método de Oaxaca mostram que os filhos de casais migrantes recentes possuem maior probabilidade de trabalhar, graças à desvantagem de seus pais no mercado de trabalho. No caso das crianças de famílias monoparentais, os filhos de mães migrantes têm maiores chances de trabalhar que os filhos de mães não migrantes.

This paper studies the relationship between single motherhood and children's height-for-age z-scores in Brazil. In order to isolate the causal effect between family structure and children's condition, we estimate an econometric model that uses male preference for firstborn sons and local sex ratios to instrument the probability of a woman becoming a single mother. Our results have a local average treatment effect interpretation (LATE). We find that children being raised by a single mother (whose marital status is affected by a firstborn girl and a low sex ratio) have a height-for-age z-score that is lower than that of children of similar characteristics that cohabit with both progenitors. We claim that the increasing trend of single motherhood in Brazil should be of concern in health policy design.

This study aimed to analyse a wide range of related health problems that respond favourably to efficient primary care treatment among adults. We evaluate the direct association of the Family Health Strategy (ESF) in Brazil on mortality of adults aged 25–64 years related to conditions for which access to effective primary care can reduce the likelihood of more severe outcomes. Additionally, we discussed heterogeneous effects associated with different intensities of the programme. To address these issues, we estimated a model with variation at the municipal level of the ESF expansion, including municipal-fixed effects, municipal specific trends and year-fixed effects. Our results show that a higher intensity of ESF is associated with reduced mortality by all conditions sensitive to primary care and for some diseases, especially after some years: avoidable conditions, asthma, heart failure, cerebrovascular diseases and gastrointestinal ulcer, infectious gastroenteritis and complications, diseases of the lower airways, hypertension, and diabetes.. As a public policy view, these results help understand how a nationwide primary care strategy can help mitigate mortality and emphasise the role of having sufficient health teams to attend to the population.