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The purpose of this paper is to present the findings of research on mothers and midwives’ understanding of the concept of respectful care in the Ugandan public health settings. It focusses on one aspect of respect; namely communication that is perhaps least resource-dependent. The research found endemic levels of disrespect and tries to understand the reasons behind these organisational cultures and the role that governance could play in improving respect.

The study involved a combination of in-depth qualitative interviews with mothers and midwives together with focus groups with a cohort of midwives registered for a degree.

The findings highlight an alarming level of verbal abuse and poor communication that both deter women from attending public health facilities and, when they have to attend, reduces their willingness to disclose information about their health status. Respect is a major factor reducing the engagement of those women unable to afford private care, with health facilities in Uganda.

Access to quality care provided by skilled birth attendants (midwives) is known to be the major factor preventing improvements in maternal mortality and morbidity in low income settings. Although communication lies at the agency end of the structure-agency continuum, important aspects of governance contribute to high levels of disrespect.

Whilst there is a lot of research on the concept of respectful care in high income settings applying this to the care environment in low resource settings is highly problematic. The findings presented here generate a more contextualised analysis generating important new insights which we hope will improve the quality of care in Uganda health facilities.

This study estimated total import demand elasticities concerning income, import prices and domestic prices. A high propensity to import constitutes a significant obstacle to economic growth in Mexico since the benefits of increased exports or any other aggregate demand expansion leak to the rest of the world.

This paper estimated a Vector Error Correction Model of the total import demand elasticities concerning income, import prices and domestic prices. Total imports are a dependent variable, while Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and import and domestic prices are the independent variables.

The principal finding is that an increase of 1 peso in the Mexican GDP leads to a rise of 0.50 pesos in Mexican imports; the elasticity of import demand for prices is low. Still, the elasticity of import demand for domestic prices is 2.14 times greater than that for import prices. These results have significant economic policy implications, such as promoting the expansion of the domestic market and the national content of exports.

It is tempting to estimate the import demand function for the entire 1993–2019 period since such data is available. But by doing so, the authors would overestimate the propensity to import, given that from 1993 to 2019, the proportion of imports as a percentage of GDP went from 11.37 in 1993 to 29.66 in 2019. Therefore, it makes more sense to estimate the import demand function from 2000 to 2019, a period with a stable proportion of imports to GDP.

A high level of imports in developing countries means that much of their aggregate demand is filtered abroad. Therefore, the low impact of its exports on GDP is related to the Mexican economy’s high imports. The authors calculate this relationship with new data and methods.

This paper aims to test purchasing power parity (PPP) hypothesis for Greece, Italy, Ireland, Portugal and Spain, which are known as the GIIPS countries.

The authors conduct a comprehensive analysis by using unit root approaches without and with structural breaks and non-linearity.

The PPP is valid for the GIIPS countries. Considering structural breaks in non-linear framework plays a crucial role.

There is no empirical study testing PPP hypothesis by focusing on the GIIPS countries. This study further takes into account for structural breaks and non-linearity in the real exchange rates of these countries.