A while back I blogged about the spate of mandated product information when one buys medicine.  I just got a scrip from the chemist with a new format consumer information in it and I’m afraid I’m pretty pissed off with what an organised piece of stupidity it really is.

Previously I wrote this.

What depresses me is that this is not hard. All it takes is to try seriously to be useful, rather than to follow a procedure. If governments can’t do this kind of thing – or rather bugger this kind of thing up – it is depressing to think of how much more limited their usefulness is than it might otherwise be.

This one reads as a kind of send up of usefulness. Virtually everything it says is a kind of joke. Some of my favourite passages.

Do not take NAPROSYN if you have
an allergy to:
• NAPROSYN or any ingredients
listed at the end of this leaflet . . .

Ask your doctor if you have any
questions why NAPROSYN has
been prescribed for you. [Now there's an idea!]

If you take this medicine after the
expiry date has passed, it may not
work as well.

If you are not sure if you should
start taking NAPROSYN, talk to
your doctor.

Follow all directions given to you by
your doctor or pharmacist carefully.

Measuring the Effects of the 1991 Federal Alcohol Tax Increase, Philip J. Cook and Christine Piette Durrance

“[A tax induced increase of 6 percent in alcohol prices] resulted in a reduction of 4.7 percent in injury deaths nationwide.”

ecause consumers reduce alcohol consumption in response to price increases, rising excise taxes on alcohol are associated with reduced levels of alcohol abuse and the related consequences for public health and safety. In The Virtuous Tax: Lifesaving and Crime-Prevention Effects of the 1991 Federal Alcohol-Tax Increase (NBER Working Paper No. 17709), authors Philip Cook and Christine Piette Durrance estimate the effects of a change in the federal tax on alcohol that took place on January 1, 1991. The federal government doubled the tax on beer and raised tax rates on wine and spirits as well, and alcohol prices jumped an average of 6 percent (adjusting for overall inflation) nationwide.

The authors find that this price increase resulted in a reduction of 4.7 percent in injury deaths nationwide during the first year. Both violent and property crime also declined after this increase in the federal tax on alcohol. Violent crime — especially robbery, aggravated assault, and rape — was apparently more sensitive to the level of alcohol consumption within a state than property crime. Among the category of property crimes, burglary and motor vehicle theft rates were most sensitive to a state’s per capita alcohol consumption after the tax increase. The authors’ results demonstrate that the alcohol-price elasticity for several health and safety outcomes is closely related to average alcohol consumption.

Though our fiscal stimulus was exemplary (except by the standards of The Australian Newspaper which requires 20,000 investments to all go off without a hitch), there was one area where I argued at the time, that could have been improved. For reasons that are a tad mysterious but almost certainly related to market failure, the funding of small to medium sized enterprises and venture capital goes into hibernation during a downturn.

This doesn’t make any sense and the government should lean against this wind, putting more effort into such investment during downturns and recouping its equity or tax revenue with less assistance during the upswing.

I don’t know if the OECD suggests this somewhere in its report, but, though it finds it’s a major problem it doesn’t suggest any solutions in the press release to its new report which corroborates the phenomenon over the current downturn in a wide cross-section of countries.

Debt Overhangs: Past and Present by Carmen M. Reinhart, Vincent R. Reinhart, Kenneth S. Rogoff

Abstract:

We identify the major public debt overhang episodes in the advanced economies since the early 1800s, characterized by public debt to GDP levels exceeding 90% for at least five years. Consistent with Reinhart and Rogoff (2010) and other more recent research, we find that public debt overhang episodes are associated with growth over one percent lower than during other periods. Perhaps the most striking new finding here is the duration of the average debt overhang episode. Among the 26 episodes we identify, 20 lasted more than a decade. Five of the six shorter episodes were immediately after World Wars I and II. Across all 26 cases, the average duration in years is about 23 years. The long duration belies the view that the correlation is caused mainly by debt buildups during business cycle recessions. The long duration also implies that cumulative shortfall in output from debt overhang is potentially massive. We find that growth effects are significant even in the many episodes where debtor countries were able to secure continual access to capital markets at relatively low real interest rates. That is, growth-reducing effects of high public debt are apparently not transmitted exclusively through high real interest rates.