Abstract The overall goal of this article is to understand the progress in implementing the New Cooperative Medical Scheme, while seeking to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the programme and, in particular, to understand its effects on the incidence of catastrophic medical payment. The study is based on two rounds of nationally representative household survey data collected in 2005 and 2008. The study found that the programme has a very high level of participation, and has increased farmers' use of medical services. However, despite efforts by both central and local governments and high household participation, the programme is only partially achieving its policy objectives. In particular, it has been able to extend to almost all of the rural population, but has failed to cover expenses for catastrophic illness, due to insufficient funds.
Aiming at understanding the regional O3 problem and the impacts of city to rural areas, ambient peroxyacetyl nitrate (PAN) and peroxypropionyl nitrate (PPN) were measured by an on-line instrument at a back garden site (BGS), and a receptor site for urban plume from Guangzhou city. The highest mixing ratios for PAN and PPN were 3.9 and 0.7 ppbv, respectively. PAN and PPN had a similar diurnal pattern as that of O3. As revealed by the slope of the linear regression line between PPN and PAN, anthropogenic volatile organic compounds (AVOCs) dominated photochemical O3 production most of the time. From the correlation between PAN and O3, the regional background level of O3 was derived to be 28 ± 15 ppbv. Two night-time plumes containing elevated PAN and O3 were observed, and the backward-trajectory analysis supported the transport of urban plume from Guangzhou city. Based on the temporal variation of PPN/PAN, two day-time episodes were also selected to discuss the influence from Guangzhou.
Hypoxia is a critical issue in the Gulf of Mexico that has challenged management efforts in recent years by an increase in hypoxia sensitivity to nitrogen loads. Several mechanisms have been proposed to explain the recent increase in sensitivity. Two commonly cited mechanisms are bottom-water reducing conditions preventing nitrification and thus denitrification, leading to more N recycling and production of oxygen-consuming organic matter, and carryover of organic matter from previous years increasing oxygen demand, making the system more sensitive. We use models informed by these mechanisms and fit with Bayesian inference to explore changes in Gulf of Mexico hypoxia sensitivity. We show that a model including an annually fit parameter representing variation in the fraction of nutrient loading and recycling contributing to bottom water oxygen demand provides a good fit to observations and is not improved by explicit inclusion of organic matter carryover to subsequent years. Both models support two stepwise increases in system sensitivity during the period of record. This change in sensitivity has greatly increased the nutrient reduction needed to achieve the established hypoxia goal. If the Gulf remains at the current state of sensitivity, our analysis suggests a roughly 70% reduction of spring TN loads from the 1988-1996 average of 6083 ton/day may be required.