Chapter 1.1 discusses the use of taxes and social health insurance contributions. A key objective of health financing is to redistribute financial resources from the healthy to the sick and from the well-off to the poor. This can be best achieved through compulsory prepayment mechanisms like taxes and social contributions. Key learning includes that

• A high reliance on public revenue raising instruments (taxes and/or social health insurance) is essential to progress towards universal health coverage.

• Large informal economies and poor governance can make collecting public revenues difficult.

• Health financing systems have to be able to adapt to

• – Offset challenges to the revenue base such as economic decline, low levels of economic development or a preponderance of informal employment or economic activity and

• – Meet increasing health care demands which grow with rising expectations and population.

• The traditional distinction between health systems that rely on general taxation (Beveridge or NHS systems) and social insurance contributions (Bismarck or SHI systems) has blurred with time.

• Health systems increasingly rely on a diverse mix of revenue raising instruments to finance health care.

• There is a growing focus on de-linking employment from entitlement to services in historically SHI-based systems and on emphasizing general taxation as a preferred source of revenues.

This chapter synthesizes the known examples of skeletal paleopathology in Neandertals including nonspecific stress indicators (mainly dental enamel hypoplasias), oral pathology (periodontal disease, caries, and tooth loss), osteoarthritis, trauma, infections and inflammations, neoplasms, and congenital disorders. Frequencies of lesions can be assessed for the dental/oral pathologies based on their larger sample sizes, but the other examples are predominately individual cases. Issues of the “osteological paradox,” mortality profiles, taphonomy, burial versus incidental preservation, and behavior must also be weighed when attempting to reconstruct aspects of Neandertal health and trauma from bony and dental lesions. Considering these skeletal pathologies together provides an indication of the levels of risk and general health experienced during the Middle Paleolithic as well as the larger biosocial implications of a foraging subsistence strategy in the Pleistocene. Overall, these abnormalities are not unique to Neandertals and reflect larger hunter-gatherer skeletal biology patterns.

This chapter explores the relationship between international trade and sustainable development, with a particular focus on climate change. It traces the evolution of the multilateral trading system from its origins in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade to the present day, highlighting the shift from a focus on trade liberalisation to a broader commitment to sustainable development. The chapter examines how the World Trade Organization has grappled with integrating environmental concerns into its framework, including the development of ‘greening’ jurisprudence, institutions, and rules. It proposes a reform agenda to further align the trading system with global sustainability goals, emphasising the need for alignment with climate change commitments, harmonised sustainability standards, reformed subsidy approaches, governance and institutional reforms, and a focus on equity and justice.

In 1920, the Italian tenor Enrico Caruso accepted a lucrative contract to sing at ten opera performances in Cuba, most of them in Havana’s recently built theater across from the Parque Central. When Caruso arrived in the island, he found a tense political climate: sugar prices had plummeted in the international market, and unemployment and economic crises had led protesting workers to the streets. During his final performance of Verdi’s Aida, a bomb exploded in the theater, sending the audience and musicians into a panic. After the explosion, Caruso’s reaction became the subject of much literary speculation. This chapter explores the accounts of Caruso and the bomb given by Carpentier, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, and Mayra Montero, and contrasts them to Caruso’s own version of the events.

The discovery of the Arthasastra of Kautilya in 1905, with its subsequent full publication and translation, triggered a re-evaluation by Indians of the political sophistication of their past, which involved a nationalist reclamation. Importantly, that included ancient Indian interpolity law. This chapter engages two periods of Indian historiography of the Indian interpolity past. After the First World War Indian writers addressed the advances of Indian interpolity law, with emphasis on Kautilya, the Mahabharata and the Code of Manu. Writers focusing primarily on international law saw the Indian past as particularly advanced by comparison to the failures of the West. A second wave after 1947 made similar moves but from the perspective of an India consciously taking its place on the world stage, and after Partition. The chapter identifies the tendency towards Indian interpolity past by writers focusing on international law, while those engaged in broader historical writing filled in a broader spectrum, such as realist depictions particularly of Kautilya but also of or other Indian writers or practice.

After briefly surveying the state of the field of classical reception studies in Asian and diasporic Asian contexts, this chapter focuses on the possibilities and implications of Asian American classical reception. This chapter argues that to refer to works as Asian American classical reception is to imbue them with a historical consciousness rooted in Asian American identity formation, which emphasises not only the political, but also the intersectional and the coalitional. Drawing on critical classical reception and Asian American studies, this chapter theorises Asian American classical reception as a critical site in which to break down imagined geographies, racialised hierarchies, and other axes of domination that continue to prop up the false binary of East and West, and with it, the idea of an exclusively White and Western inheritance of Graeco-Roman antiquity. It concludes by applying this theory to a case study, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior.

A primary purpose of this chapter is not to give a comprehensive overview on a process of accepting modern Western international law in Japan from the middle of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century, but to add fresh perspectives to analyse the process. The central focus here is on a vigorously debated issue at that time among the officials of the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Japanese politicians and Western envoys stationed in Japan: the issue of the territorial sea and the inland sea of Japan, especially the breadth of the territorial sea. Two main cases, the Proclamations of Neutrality at the time of the 1870 Franco-German (Prussian) War and a collision case between the Chishima, a Japanese warship, and the Ravenna, a British post boat, in the Inland Sea of Japan in 1892 , are analysed in detail from this perspective.

This chapter analyses security exceptions in international trade law, focusing on their interpretation and application within the World Trade Organization (WTO) and preferential trade agreements (PTAs). It examines the evolving nature of national security concerns, particularly in cybersecurity, and how these concerns intersect with trade regulations. The chapter discusses the justiciability of security exceptions, the level of deference accorded to states in defining their security interests, and the challenges posed by the expansion of security concerns beyond traditional military domains. It also evaluates the adequacy of existing WTO and PTA frameworks in addressing contemporary security issues, suggesting that further innovations may be necessary to balance trade liberalisation with national security imperatives in the digital age.

This chapter examines the growing trend towards integration of gender considerations into international trade agreements. It analyses the rationale behind this trend, exploring both rights-based and economic efficiency-based arguments for promoting gender equality through trade. The chapter discusses various approaches to integrating gender provisions, including mainstreaming within functional chapters, as well as dedicated chapters, and highlights the variations in focus areas in particular agreements, ranging from economic empowerment to social concerns. It further categorises the roles of women addressed in these agreements, such as employees, decision-makers, mothers, and business stakeholders. The analysis reveals gaps in addressing critical issues like the informal sector and digital inclusion, and underscores the importance of enforceable provisions for effective implementation.

This study of the years of Carpentier’s revolutionary commitment in Havana focuses on his activities and travels around the world, his contacts with Latin American writers, lectures and essays written during that time. Fornet argues that while these years did not yield much literary outcome, they did matter for Carpentier’s commitment to collective projects, such as the directorship of the Editorial Nacional and other important official functions. Fornet points to references, in some of Carpentier’s essays, to other writers and to earlier chronicles, such as an early review of the Soviet author Vsevolov Ivanov’s “Armored Train” from 1926, where Carpentier had noted that a revolution requires a new order of ideas, and that it mattered to stay with the revolution. The chapter suggests that Carpentier’s decision to return to Cuba was consistent with what he had written earlier. Among other multiple activities during that time, Carpentier’s interest in popular music are discussed, as well as the premieres of two of his ballet scenarios.

During the tenth through the seventh centuries BCE, the Cypriot Iron Age city-kingdoms were established and Cyprus gradually emerged on the international stage of the ancient Near East within the sphere of the Phoenicians, Assyrians, and Egyptians. According to later tradition, Greek heroes (e.g., Teucros of Salamis) founded most of the city-kingdoms, there was an indigenous stronghold at Amathus, and Phoenicians founded a colony at Kition. Inscriptions support this picture of three distinct population groups resident on Cyprus, each preserving its individual language. Archaeological evidence reveals very little of the Cypriot way of life during these centuries within the settlements; we are chiefly dependent on funerary remains and the evidence from religious sanctuaries; however, the material culture from these sites sheds some light upon the concerns of the inhabitants and how they expressed their diverse identities. The funerary record also reveals the emergence of an elite group who buried their dead in elaborate built tombs – most spectacular are the wealthy so-called Royal Tombs of Salamis. This chapter examines changes in the geopolitical organization and how Cyprus was incorporated within the East Mediterranean during the Early Iron Age, namely through emerging trade with the Aegean and political relationships with the Assyrians.