Accountable Government Spending: A Cross-National Analysis of Child Mortality in Developing Nations.

What can national governments do to improve their capacity for well-being? While increasing public medical care expenditures can facilitate increased well-being in developing nations, cross-national research often finds that public medical care expenditures have no effect on indicators of well-being, such as child mortality. This ineffective public spending could be due to a lack of governance; however, this relationship is understudied in the cross-national literature. Using 2-way fixed and generalized least squares random effects models for a sample of 74 low- and middle-income nations from 1996 to 2012, I examine how the interaction among 5 measures of national governance and public medical care expenditures impact child mortality. The findings reveal the importance of governance in determining the effectiveness of public medical care expenditures. Both public medical care expenditures and governance improvements are essential to reduce child mortality.

"Inactive" ingredients in oral medications.

Oral forms of medications contain "inactive" ingredients to enhance their physical properties. Using data analytics, we characterized the abundance and complexity of inactive ingredients in approved medications. A majority of medications contain ingredients that could cause adverse reactions, underscoring the need to maximize the tolerability and safety of medications and their inactive ingredients.