Wednesday, December 16, 2015

Facts and Stats

Note: This is my last blog post on Blogger. Last update was January 26th, 2016. The blog has moved over to amarasooriya.wordpress.com. 

This blog post is just an informational one. I created this because I have noticed that when people have debates, they either do not use evidence and/or may have trouble finding the relevant information to assist their arguments. This blog post is meant to be a starting point to assist people with that challenge.
I also believe that statistics can always be argued against using other statistics, and that people use statistics to justify their previously established values and beliefs. I believe that people don’t usually search for statistics to counter their beliefs as often as they search for statistics to confirm them (although I haven’t found a statistic on this statement). Therefore, be wary of them as they can be used in manipulative ways, and realize that statistics, in essence, are limited.
Points to remember:
  • I do not own any of the intellectual material. They belong to the links and references provided. Please give them all credit if you use these statistics.
  • These statistics are not meant to be political. While I can see how some of these statistics may be interpreted that way, that was not my intention. Use the statistics to start a conversation and a journey into more research. Don`t use them in isolation or out of context.
  • The references are not in a consistent format and do not follow one specific referencing style. This was due to the variety of sources from where I have obtained these statistics.
  • I have bolded certain terms in order to help make this blog post easier to read, as I recognize that it is long and tedious. My advice is to read it in parts or only on the topics that you are interested in.
  • This blog post will be updated as time goes by.

Canadian Statistics
Population: 35.75 million (2015).
  • Statistics Canada.
  • World Bank.
Unemployment rate: 6.8% (2015).
  • Statistics Canada.
Highway 401 is the busiest highway in the world, with average annual daily traffic (AADT) of more than 425,000 vehicles in 2004, and daily traffic sometimes exceeding 500,000 vehicles.
Only 14% of leadership is reflective of the diversity in the population; there is not enough representation of visible minorities and under-represented immigrant groups in the GTA’s leadership.
Homelessness
35,000 Canadians are homeless on a given Night.
  • Stephen Gaetz, Tanya Gulliver, & Tim Richter. The State of Homelessness in Canada: 2014. Toronto: The Homeless Hub Press.
Over 235,000 Canadians experience homelessness in a year.
  • Stephen Gaetz, Tanya Gulliver, & Tim Richter. The State of Homelessness in Canada: 2014. Toronto: The Homeless Hub Press.
Homelessness costs the Canadian economy $7 billion annually. This includes not only the cost of emergency shelters, but social services, health care and corrections.
  • Stephen Gaetz, Tanya Gulliver, & Tim Richter. The State of Homelessness in Canada: 2014. Toronto: The Homeless Hub Press.

U.S.A. Statistics
Population: 318.9 million (2014).
  • United States Census Bureau.
There were 784 active hate groups in the United States in 2014.
Out of the 197 million votes cast for federal candidates between 2002 and 2005, only 40voters were indicted for voter fraud. Only 26 of those cases, or about .00000013 percent of the votes cast, resulted in convictions or guilty pleas.
Approximately 96% of the population has access to at most two wireline providers.
In at least 65 (40.6%) of the 160 active shooter incidents that occurred between 2000-2013, citizen engagement or the shooter committing suicide ended the shooting at the scene before law enforcement arrived. In 21 incidents (13.1%), the situation ended after unarmed citizens safely and successfully restrained the shooter. In 2 of those incidents, 24 3 off-duty law enforcement officers were present and assisted. In 5 incidents (3.1%), the shooting ended after armed individuals who were not law enforcement personnel exchanged gunfire with the shooters.
In 2013, state lottery sales totaled $68 billion, with lower income households spend a higher percentage of their money on lottery tickets. Odds in winning are one in 176 million.
Regular lottery players lost an average of $106 a year, while the average annual loss for video slots/poker players was $2,564.
Miss America states it provides $45 million in scholarships, but in 2012, they spent only $482,000 in scholarships. This is due to the fact that the organization counts all the scholarships it provides, not just the ones that are claimed/awarded and using theoretical projections that counted all applicants of the pageant. Yet its lowest number is still greater than any other scholarship for women.
Across Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, the Obama administration has launched eight times as many drone strikes as were launched in the entire Bush presidency.
While the Afghan Allies Protection Act of 2009 allows up to 1,500 Afghan nationals to receive special immigrant visas, only 3 visas were issued in the 2011 fiscal year.
Financial conflicts of interest may bias conclusions from systematic reviews (SRs) on sugar-sweetened beverages (SSB) consumption and weight gain or obesity. Among those reviews without any reported conflict of interest, 83.3% of the conclusions (10/12) were that SSB consumption could be a potential risk factor for weight gain. In contrast, the same percentage of conclusions, 83.3% (5/6), of those SRs disclosing some financial conflict of interest with the food industry were that the scientific evidence was insufficient to support a positive association between SSB consumption and weight gain or obesity. Those reviews with conflicts of interest were five times more likely to present a conclusion of no positive association than those without them (relative risk: 5.0, 95% confidence interval: 1.3–19.3).
  • Bes-Rastrollo M, Schulze MB, Ruiz-Canela M, Martinez-Gonzalez MA. Financial Conflicts of Interest and Reporting Bias Regarding the Association between Sugar-Sweetened Beverages and Weight Gain: A Systematic Review of Systematic Reviews.December 31st, 2013. PLoS Med 10(12): e1001578. doi: 10.1371/journal.pmed.1001578. http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1001578.
The effectiveness of state ethic commissions/panels were given grades of either a “D” or a “F” to 28 of them in 2012.
Congress enacted 185 laws from January 3rd, 2013 until November 2nd 2014, while across the country, state legislatures in 47 states and the District of Columbia’s city council have passed more than 24,000 bills into law in 2014 alone. That’s an average of 462 new laws per state.
Few worksites (less than 10%) perceive negative effects of complying with the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 on “employee productivity, absenteeism, turnover, career advancement, and morale, as well as the business’s profitability.
$8 billion was spent on 55 new sports facilities over the 1990s. However, $12 billion was spent on 51 new facilities opened between 2000 and 2010. Also, over the past 20 years, the replacement rate for stadiums was more than 90 percent.
  • Judith Grant Long. Public/private Partnerships for Major League Sports Facilities.
The large and growing peer-reviewed economics literature on the economic impacts of stadiums, arenas, sports franchises, and sport mega-events has consistently found no substantial evidence of increased jobs, incomes, or tax revenues for a community associated with any of these things.
Health
70% of Americans take at least one prescription drug. More than 50% take two prescription drugs and 4.02 billion prescriptions were written in 2011. Total drug spending jumped 3% to $329.2 billion in 2013 (works out to around $1,000 per person).
Drug companies spend $4 billion on direct to consumer marketing, but spend $24 billionmarketing to health care providers. Numbers from GlobalData show that 9 out of 10 Big Pharma companies spend more on marketing than on research and development.
Consumers were estimated to have spent $2.2 billion on candy in 2014.
Americans consume 22 teaspoons a day, about triple the daily requirement. That amounts to 75 pounds of sugar a year for every man, woman and child in the U.S.
  • National Center for Health Statistics.
Education
22 states and the District of Columbia mandate sex education. 13 states require that the instruction be medically accurate.
No Child Left Behind, the education accountability law enacted under President George W. Bush, nearly tripled the required number of tests from six to 17.
Analyses by Stanford University provide no support for the hypothesis that “No Child Left Behind” has led, on average, to a narrowing of racial achievement gaps.
Ferguson Data 2013
Blacks accounted for 86% of traffic stops, 92% of police searches, and nearly 93% of arrests but make up 63% of the population.
  • Missouri Attorney General’s Office.
Civil Forfeiture
Civil forfeiture cash seizures: Under the federal Equitable Sharing Program, police have seized $2.5 billion (61,998 cash seizures) since 2001 from people who were not charged with a crime and without a warrant being issued. Police reasoned that the money was crime-related. About $1.7 billion was sent back to law enforcement agencies for their use. However, since 2012, civil forfeiture laws have also helped cripple powerful drug-trafficking organizations, and thwart an assortment of criminals.
Since 2012, civil forfeiture laws have helped the Department of Justice turn over more than $1.5 billion in forfeited assets to four hundred thousand crime victims, often in cases of corporate criminality.
Police Militarization
Since 1996, in response to the “War on Drugs”, the Defense Department 1033 Program transferred $4.3 billion in military equipment to local police.
  • NBC News.
79% of SWAT deployments were for the purpose of executing a search warrant, most commonly in drug investigations.
Prison
U.S. has the highest prison population in the world, totaling 2.217 million.
Prison populations are now eight times what they were in 1970.
From October 1 2012 to March 31 2013, 96.9% of cases processed included pleas, rather than going to trial.
Drug offenders accounted for 50% of the male federal prison population and 58% of the female federal prison population in 2012.
In 2011-12, an estimated 4.0% of state and federal prison inmates and 3.2% of jail inmates reported experiencing one or more incidents of sexual victimization by another inmate or facility staff in the past 12 months or since admission to the facility, if less than 12 months.
Blacks were 10.1 times more likely than whites to enter prison for drug offenses.
Pay and staffing ratios are lower in private prisons than in public ones.
A closer examination of inmates reveals that just over 5,000 inmates, or 38.5% of the total prison population, had an option to post bail but were held in custody solely due to their inability to meet the terms of bail. This means that the inmates were not serving a sentence, had no holds or detainers, and could have been released if they were able to post bail in the form of cash, cash/bond, 10% option or support arrears.
A study on one system showed that pretrial services only costs a tenth as much daily compared to keeping someone locked up ($7.24 compared with $73.03).
The U.S. prison population is more than 2.4 million. That’s more than quadrupled since 1980. That means more than one out of every 100 American adults is behind bars.
At least 29 states have taken steps to roll back mandatory sentences since 2000.
There are 18 states where, in theory, anyone can become a bail recovery agent regardless of education, training, or prior criminal history.
Death Penalty
The cost of the death penalty in California has totaled over $4 billion since 1978:
-$1.94 billion–Pre-Trial and Trial Costs
-$925 million–Automatic Appeals and State Habeas Corpus Petitions
-$775 million–Federal Habeas Corpus Appeals
-$1 billion–Costs of Incarceration
  • S. Death Penalty Information Center. http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/costs-death-penalty.
  • Judge Arthur L. Alarcon & Paula M. Mitchell. Executing the Will of the Voters?: A roadmap to mend or end the California legislature’s multi-billion dollar death penalty debacle. Published in 44 Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review S41, Special Issue (2011).
Scientific studies have consistently failed to demonstrate that executions deter people from committing crime any more than long prison sentences.
Death Penalty: There have been at least 330 DNA post-conviction exonerations since forensic testing.
It is estimated that if all death-sentenced defendants remained under sentence of death indefinitely, at least 4.1% would be exonerated.
  • Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, current as of March 25th, 2014.
Public Defenders
According to the American Bar Association (ABA), researchers estimate that anywhere from 60 to 90 percent of criminal defendants need publicly-funded attorneys, depending on the jurisdiction. Yet most public defenders are unable to meet this demand due, in part, to the deluge of low-level charges and misdemeanor cases.
In New Orleans, part-time defenders are handling the equivalent of almost 19,000 cases per year per attorney, which literally limits them to seven minutes per case.
In 2007, 40% of all county-based public defender offices had no investigators on staff.
  • S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs. Bureau of Justice Statistics Special Report. Census of Public Defender Offices, 2007. County-based and Local Public Defender Offices, 2007. September 2010. www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/clpdo07.pdf.
Prisoner Re-Entry
Each year, more than 600,000 individuals are released from state and federal prisons, andover 11 million cycle through local jails. In addition, a broader population – approximatelyone in three U.S. adults – has an arrest record, mostly for relatively minor, non-violent offenses, and sometimes as a result of crimes committed decades in the past.
Pew, in collaboration with the Association of State Correctional Administrators (ASCA), undertook a comprehensive survey aimed at producing the first state-by-state look at recidivism rates. The Pew/ASCA survey asked states to report three-year return to-prison rates for all inmates released from their prison systems in 1999 and 2004.This survey differs from the prior Bureau of Justice Statistics study in many important ways, the most significant of which is that it includes recidivism data from more than twice as many states. According to the survey results, 45.4 percent of people released from prison in 1999 and 43.3 percent of those sent home in 2004 were reincarcerated within three years, either for committing a new crime or for violating conditions governing their release.
While differences in survey methods complicate direct comparisons of national recidivism rates over time, a comparison of the states included in both the Pew/ASCA and BJS studies reveals that recidivism rates have been largely stable. When excluding California, whose size skews the national picture, recidivism rates between 1994 and 2007 have consistently remained around 40 percent.
Two-thirds of adult parolees who returned to incarceration are due to parole violations (missing appointments, failing a drug test, etc.).
At least 95 percent of all inmates in America will ultimately be released and returned to the community.
Pew Center on the States, State of Recidivism: The Revolving Door of America’s Prisons (Washington, DC: The Pew Charitable Trusts, April 2011). http://www.michigan.gov/documents/corrections/Pew_Report_State_of_Recidivism_350337_7.pdf.
Racism
Thousands of resumes were mailed to employers. They were identical except for names. Black-sounding names were 50% less likely to be called back.
  • Marianne Bertrand. Field Study Experiment on Racial Bias in Hiring. 2003. University of Chicago.
Black people are charged prices roughly $700 higher than white people when buying cars.
  • Sendhil Mullainathan. Racial Bias, Even When We Have Good Intentions. 2015. New York Times Economic Review.
Studies show black drivers are twice as likely to get pulled over.
  • ACLU Special Report. Driving While Black: Racial Profiling on Our Nation’s Highways.
  • Racial Profiling Prohibition Project: Traffic Stop Data Analysis. 2013-2014.
  • USA Today Arrest Rates Study: FBI Arrest Records Analysis. 2014.
  • US Department of Justice. Police Behaviour During Traffic and Street Stops. 2011.
  • Kalamazoo Department of Public Safety: Traffic Stop Data Analysis Project. 2013.
Black clients are shown 17.7% fewer houses for sale.
  • The Federal Department of Housing and Urban Development: Housing Discrimination Against Racial and Ethnic Minorities.
Marijuana use is equal between blacks and whites, yet black people are 4 times more likely to be arrested.
  • American Civil Liberties Union: The War on Marijuana in Black and White. 2013.
Black people are incarcerated at nearly six times the rate of white people.
  • Marc Mauer and Ryan S. King. Uneven Justice: State Rates of Incarceration by Race and Ethnicity. The Sentencing Project.
Doctors did not inform black patients as often as white ones about an important heart procedure.
  • The New England Journal of Medicine. 1999. The Effect of Race and Sex on Physicians’ Recommendations for Cardiac Catheterization.
White legislators did not respond as frequently to constituents with black sounding names in both political parties.
  • A 2011 Yale University Field Experiment on State Legislators by Butler and Broockman.
There is no correlation between increased immigration of any kind and increased rates of violent crimes.
  • Stowell, J. I., Messner, S. F., McGeever, K. F. and Raffalovich, L. E. 2009. Immigration and the Recent Violent Crime Drop in the United States: A Pooled, Cross-Sectional Time-Series Analysis of Metropolitan Areas. Criminology, 47: 889–928. doi: 10.1111/j.1745-9125.2009.00162.x.
LGBTQ Community
There are approximately 9 million LGBT Americans (estimated 3.5% of American adults). There are nearly 700,000 transgender individuals in the US (estimated 0.3% of American adults).
Transgender respondents lived in extreme poverty; the sample was nearly four times more likely to have a household income of less than $10,000/year compared to the general population. 41% of transgender respondents reported attempting suicide compared to 1.6% of the general population.
Those who expressed a transgender identity or gender non-conformity while in grades K-12 reported alarming rates of harassment (78%), physical assault (35%) and sexual violence (12%); harassment was so severe that it led almost one-sixth (15%) to leave a school in K-12 settings or in higher education.
Approximately 15,500 transgender individuals are serving on active duty or in the Guard or Reserve forces. It is also estimated that there are an estimated 134,300 transgender individuals who are veterans or are retired from Guard or Reserve service.
Mental Health
Databases that track gun homicides, such as the National Center for Health Statistics, show that fewer than 5% of the 120 000 gun-related killings in the United States between 2001 and 2010 were perpetrated by people diagnosed with mental illness.
A meta-analysis of published studies comparing perpetuation of violence with violent victimization by and against persons with mental illness concludes that “victimization is a greater public health concern than perpetration.”
  • Choe J. Y., Teplin L. A., and Abram K. M. (2008). Perpetration of violence, violent victimization, and severe mental illness: balancing public health concerns. Psychiatr Serv., 59(2): 153—164.
  • Jonathan M. Metzl and Kenneth T. MacLeish. Mental Illness, Mass Shootings, and the Politics of American Firearms. American Journal of Public Health: February 2015, Vol. 105, No. 2, pp. 240-249. doi: 10.2105/AJPH.2014.302242 http://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/pdf/10.2105/AJPH.2014.302242.
In 2013, an estimated 43.8 million adults aged 18 or older in the United States had any mental illness (AMI) in the past year. This represents 18.5 percent of all adults in the U.S. The percentage of adults with AMI in 2013 was similar to the estimate in 2012.
  • Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, Results from the 2013 National Survey on Drug Use and Health: Mental Health Findings, NSDUH Series H-49, HHS Publication No. (SMA) 14-4887. Rockville, MD: Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 2014. samhsa.gov/data/sites/default/files/NSDUHmhfr2013/NSDUHmhfr2013.pdf.
Among adults aged 18 or older in 2013, 10.0 million (4.2%) had serious mental illness (SMI) in the past year. The percentage of adults with past year SMI in 2013 was higher than in 2008 (3.7 percent) and 2009 (3.7 percent) and was similar to the percentages in 2010 (4.1 percent), 2011 (3.9 percent), and 2012 (4.1 percent).
  • Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, Results from the 2013 National Survey on Drug Use and Health: Mental Health Findings, NSDUH Series H-49, HHS Publication No. (SMA) 14-4887. Rockville, MD: Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 2014. samhsa.gov/data/sites/default/files/NSDUHmhfr2013/NSDUHmhfr2013.pdf.
Numbers obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and prepared exclusively for the Associated Press by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services show nearly125,000 young and middle-aged adults with serious mental illness lived in U.S. nursing homes last year.
In a mental health crisis, people are more likely to encounter police than get medical help. As a result, 2 million people with mental illness are booked into jails each year. Nearly 15%of men and 30% of women booked into jails have a serious mental health condition.
Although no national data is collected, multiple informal studies and accounts support the conclusion that “at least half of the people shot and killed by police each year in this country have mental health problems.
Police Crisis Intervention Teams (CIT) helps to reduce arrests and save money, yet only 15 percent of law enforcement jurisdictions have adopted the program.
Assertive community treatment, or ACT, is an intensive and highly integrated approach for community mental health service delivery. ACT programs serve outpatients whose symptoms of mental illness result in serious functioning difficulties in several major areas of life, often including work, social relationships, residential independence, money management, and physical health and wellness. Data collected at the Douglas Hospital in Montréal indicated direct costs of ACT services of about $9116 (Canadian) per client per year in 1999/2000, whereas direct costs for an inpatient day in the adult psychiatry ward were $215. Under such circumstances, for a patient spending on average 60 days in hospital per year, a 58% reduction would yield a saving of 34.8 days × $215 = $7482, and a 78% reduction would yield a saving of 46.8 × $215 = $10 062, slightly more than the cost of the ACT team itself. These calculations assume that there would be no reduction in the costs of other outpatient services or of the emergency department. Thus, under these fairly conservative assumptions, ACT services approximately pay for themselves. Indeed, in nearly all studies where the net costs of ACT have been evaluated, ACT has been reported as a cost-saving intervention, although the differences are typically not statistically significant.
Wealth Inequality
In 2012, the top 1 per cent of earners in the U.S. accounted for 19.3 per cent of pre-tax income; that is the largest per cent since 1927.
  • An analysis of IRS figures dating to 1913 by economist Emmanuel Saez of the University of California, Berkeley, and three colleagues.
Of all the billionaires on the Forbes 400, 71 inherited their wealth, and 56 inherited at least a portion but are still growing it. Of the Forbes 400, only 0.25% are African American (Oprah Winfrey).
65% of Americans believe the gap between the rich and everyone else has increased in the last 10 years. By a 60% to 36% margin, most Americans feel the economic system unfairly favors the wealthy, as opposed to being fair to all. Yet, 60% say most people who want to get ahead can make it if they are willing to work hard.
Only 2.7 percent of farm estates would be required to file an estate tax return, with a much smaller share of estates (about 0.8 percent) owing any Federal estate tax.
99.8% of estates owe no estate tax at all.
In the United States, the average income of the richest 10% is 16 times as large as for the poorest 10%.
  • 2014. United States: Tackling High Inequalities. Paris, OECD publishing.
A Defense Department review released in 2013 showed that military families were more reliant on food stamps in 2013 than in any previous year, with over $100 million in food stamp spending at military grocery stores. In 2011, nationwide, in any given month, a total of 900,000 veterans nationwide lived in households that relied on SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) to provide food for their families.
Student Debt
7 of 10 graduating students left college in debt in 2013. The total bill due for students in America is currently $1.2 trillion.
  • PBS news station THIRTEEN.
Student debt is bigger than credit cards and auto loans and is second only to mortgages.
Education debt has tripled in the last 10 years.
States spending on higher education nationwide is down 23% compared with the 2007-2008 school year. Tuition at four-year public colleges has risen by 28% since the 2007-2008 school year.
Nursing program applicants for a program in North Carolina so outnumber available slots that there is a waiting list just to get on the waiting list.
Students at for-profit colleges account for 31% of all student loans, despite only having13% of the total higher education population.
For-profit colleges received $1.7 billion in Post-9/11 G.I. Bill benefits in the 2012-2013 school year.
In 2011, for-profit schools have spent more than $10 million advocating against the Obama administration’s first gainful employment rule, a rule that tightens regulations. The campaign worked; the rules were weakened and eventually struck down completely.
Smoking
Adult smoking rates have fallen from about 43% in 1965 to about 18% in 2014.
Infrastructure
In 2007, the last year for which statistics are available, Texas had just 7 inspectors responsible for 7,400 dams. That’s over 1,050 dams per inspector. The state was only able to look at 239 dams. That same year, Iowa had one full-time and one part-time inspector. Overseeing 3,344 dams. They were only able to inspect 128 dams. Alabama doesn’t even have an inspection agency to monitor its 2,000-plus dams.
  • The Crumbling of America. History Channel Documentary Film. Initial release: June 22, 2009.
Fashion
Apparel and footwear contributed $361 billion to the U.S. economy in 2013. On average, every American, including every man, woman, and child in the United States, spent $1,141to purchase 64 garments and 7 ½ pairs of shoes in 2013, more than any other country in the world. 97% of all clothes and 98% of all shoes sold in the United States today are still imported.
Food Waste
40% of all the food produced in the United States never gets eaten. Americans throw away$165 billion worth of food every year (about 20 pounds per person every month, which can fill around 730 football stadiums per year).
US per capita food waste has progressively increased by approximately 50% since 1974 reaching more than 1400 kcal per person per day or 150 trillion kcal per year. Food waste now accounts for more than one quarter of the total freshwater consumption and approximately 300 million barrels of oil per year.
In 2013, 49.1 million people lived in food-insecure households.
91% of consumers reported that at least occasionally they had discarded food past its “sell by” date out of concern for the product’s safety, with 25 percent reporting that they always did so.
A thorough search of filings and review of reported decisions did not turn up a single case that involved food donation-related liability or any attempts to get around the protections offered by the Bill Emerson Act.

World Statistics
World Population: 7,386,886,582 (as of December 2015).
A 2010 poll in Great Britain showed that 51% support the re-introduction of the death penalty for murder.
  • YouGov Survey Sample of 1,948 Great Britain adults, September 8-9, 2010.
The United States, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and China are responsible for 82% of the world’s executions.
  • Amnesty International.
Countries with high levels of inequality suffered lower growth than nations that distributed incomes more evenly. An analysis of various efforts to redistribute incomes showed they had a neutral effect on GDP growth.
According to the United Nations, USA and Papua New Guinea are the only countries in the world that do not provide any paid time off for new mothers (does not offer a monetary supplement to new mothers on maternity leave from their jobs).
Since laws on plain packaging for tobacco were introduced in 2011, that total consumption of tobacco and cigarettes in the March quarter 2014 is the lowest ever recorded, as measured by estimated expenditure on tobacco products i.e. $5.135 billion in September 1959, $3.508 billion in December 2012 and $3.405 billion in March 2014.
In Uruguay, three quarters of smokers surveyed would support a total ban on tobacco products within 10 years and nearly 60 percent believe tobacco companies are unethical. Ban on multiple brand presentations has halved number of smokers who falsely believe that “light” cigarettes are less harmful. Over 90 percent of smokers now support smoking bans in restaurants and workplaces, up from 54 percent in 2006.
  • ITC Project (August, 2014). ITC Uruguay National Report. Findings from the Wave 1 to 4 Surveys (2006-2012). University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada; Centro de Investigación para la Epidemia del Tabaquismo and Universidad de la República, Uruguay. http://www.itcproject.org/node/119.
National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) surveyed 457 employers who recruit new college and university graduates throughout North America, and an overwhelming 92% stated, “A candidate’s overall appearance influences their opinion about the candidate.
  • Coplin, B. 2003. 10 things employers want you to learn in college. Ten Speed Press, Berkeley, U.S.A.
Migrants and Refugees
Research by Giovanni Peri of the University of California, and Mette Foged of the University of Copenhagen shows how an influx of lower-wage immigrants into a community tends to raise wages for everyone else. Their work states that low-skilled foreign workers and low-skilled domestic workers often complement each other instead of displacing each other.
The study also found that an influx of refugees into Denmark in the 1990s led native workers to switch to more skilled jobs and away from jobs that were mostly manual labor. As a result, some local workers earned higher wages.
A working paper published in 2014 by four economists found that immigration benefited local populations in 19 of the 20 industrialized countries they studied.
  • Michele Battisti, Gabriel J. Felbermayr, Giovanni Peri, and Panu Poutvaara. Immigration, Search, and Redistribution: A Quantitative Assessment of Native Welfare. May 2014. NBER Working Paper No. w20131. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2438552.
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)