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National levels of personal health-care access and quality can be approximated by measuring mortality rates from causes that should not be fatal in the presence of effective medical care (ie, amenable mortality). Previous analyses of mortality amenable to health care only focused on high-income countries and faced several methodological challenges. In the present analysis, we use the highly standardised cause of death and risk factor estimates generated through the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study (GBD) to improve and expand the quantification of personal health-care access and quality for 195 countries and territories from 1990 to 2015. We mapped the most widely used list of causes amenable to personal health care developed by Nolte and McKee to 32 GBD causes. We accounted for variations in cause of death certification and misclassifications through the extensive data standardisation processes and redistribution algorithms developed for GBD. To isolate the effects of personal health-care access and quality, we risk-standardised cause-specific mortality rates for each geography-year by removing the joint effects of local environmental and behavioural risks, and adding back the global levels of risk exposure as estimated for GBD 2015. We employed principal component analysis to create a single, interpretable summary measure–the Healthcare Quality and Access (HAQ) Index–on a scale of 0 to 100. The HAQ Index showed strong convergence validity as compared with other health-system indicators, including health expenditure per capita (r=0·88), an index of 11 universal health coverage interventions (r=0·83), and human resources for health per 1000 (r=0·77). We used free disposal hull analysis with bootstrapping to produce a frontier based on the relationship between the HAQ Index and the Socio-demographic Index (SDI), a measure of overall development consisting of income per capita, average years of education, and total fertility rates. This frontier allowed us to better quantify the maximum levels of personal health-care access and quality achieved across the development spectrum, and pinpoint geographies where gaps between observed and potential levels have narrowed or widened over time. Between 1990 and 2015, nearly all countries and territories saw their HAQ Index values improve; nonetheless, the difference between the highest and lowest observed HAQ Index was larger in 2015 than in 1990, ranging from 28·6 to 94·6. Of 195 geographies, 167 had statistically significant increases in HAQ Index levels since 1990, with South Korea, Turkey, Peru, China, and the Maldives recording among the largest gains by 2015. Performance on the HAQ Index and individual causes showed distinct patterns by region and level of development, yet substantial heterogeneities emerged for several causes, including cancers in highest-SDI countries; chronic kidney disease, diabetes, diarrhoeal diseases, and lower respiratory infections among middle-SDI countries; and measles and tetanus among lowest-SDI countries. While the global HAQ Index average rose from 40·7 (95% uncertainty interval, 39·0–42·8) in 1990 to 53·7 (52·2–55·4) in 2015, far less progress occurred in narrowing the gap between observed HAQ Index values and maximum levels achieved; at the global level, the difference between the observed and frontier HAQ Index only decreased from 21·2 in 1990 to 20·1 in 2015. If every country and territory had achieved the highest observed HAQ Index by their corresponding level of SDI, the global average would have been 73·8 in 2015. Several countries, particularly in eastern and western sub-Saharan Africa, reached HAQ Index values similar to or beyond their development levels, whereas others, namely in southern sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and south Asia, lagged behind what geographies of similar development attained between 1990 and 2015. This novel extension of the GBD Study shows the untapped potential for personal health-care access and quality improvement across the development spectrum. Amid substantive advances in personal health care at the national level, heterogeneous patterns for individual causes in given countries or territories suggest that few places have consistently achieved optimal health-care access and quality across health-system functions and therapeutic areas. This is especially evident in middle-SDI countries, many of which have recently undergone or are currently experiencing epidemiological transitions. The HAQ Index, if paired with other measures of health-system characteristics such as intervention coverage, could provide a robust avenue for tracking progress on universal health coverage and identifying local priorities for strengthening personal health-care quality and access throughout the world. Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

This paper offers a nuanced analysis of how sport intersects with race and gender in creating identities in post-colonial Zimbabwe. It traces the biography of Zimbabwe’s most successful Olympian swimmer, Kirsty Coventry, from her success at the 2004 Olympics in Athens to her appointment as the Minister of Sport in 2018. The selective acceptance of Coventry’s whiteness against the backdrop of a general rejection of white identity in Zimbabwe points to a nuanced understanding of race. It suggests that whiteness in Zimbabwe is not inherently incompatible with national identity but is often constructed as such for political expediency. Coventry’s case reveals that the state can redefine who is considered a legitimate Zimbabwean based on contributions to national pride and the political context. This flexibility in racial identity construction highlights the dynamic nature of postcolonial identity politics in Zimbabwe. Her victories came when Zimbabwe descended into a socio-economic and political crisis after the ruling ZANU PF regime took over white-owned farmers in a move meant to redress colonial land disposition. FormerPresident Robert Mugabe’s party created a narrative of white farmers as foreigners who did not belong and whose forefathers stole land from black Africans. As a white woman, she was part of these foreigners, yet the former president called her “golden girl” and awarded her US$100,000 in cash for her performance. Through content analysis of media coverage of her success and homecoming, we highlight how success in sport separated Coventry from colonial masters portrayed in the narrative ZANU PF has created around white people. Success in sport created an identity around Coventry, which had nothing to do with her race; she became a Zimbabwean, our golden girl.

With this publication, Keith Coventry (*1958, Burnley, Great Britain) presents an overview of his oeuvre from its beginnings in the early 1990s to the present day, shedding light on his exploration of the legacy of modernism and post-modernism. In his series 'Junk Paintings' (2012), for example, a new visual vocabulary containing elements of the famous McDonald's logo shifts into focus, blending with Minimalism and Pop Art. In the white 'Pure Junk Paintings' (2015/16) he continues his work with these formal elements, but using new materials: wood, muslin, beeswax, glass, and gesso lend the paintings a sculptural presence. The same is true of the series 'Golden Arches' (2016), for which parts of the McDonald's logo were cast in bronze and heavily gold plated, contrasting a cheap, mass produced commodity with materials representing permanence, craft, and value. In Coventry's art the consumer world and mass production encounter an aesthetic characterized by beauty and timelessness.

Nostalgia has historically been negatively characterised by desire to reconnect with an idealised past lost to the 'destructive' forces of modernity, but studies across the social sciences have recently sought to re-appraise the creative and embodied significance of individuals' recollections. This paper contributes to this developing debate by empirically exploring the value of individual remembering in relation to the urban material landscape. First, drawing on recently collected go-along data from long-term residents of two UK cities, Birmingham and Coventry, it is argued that nostalgia could be considered a more progressive force in urban life, especially amongst residents in cities that have undergone and are undergoing physical change as a consequence of 'official' attempts to reconstruct, regenerate and/or repackage particular urban spaces; developing a richer understanding of the interplay between official and unofficial nostalgias can better inform planning decisions that are more likely to be socially acceptable and supported by local communities. Second, though there are clear advantages of developing a fuller theoretical and methodological consideration of urban nostalgia, this paper then uses go-along data to demonstrate that much remains to be learnt from exploring how the material urban environment can encourage and/or limit individual efforts to keep potentially distressing aspects of their past concealed.

Twelve-year-old Kasienka and her mother have immigrated to Coventry, England from Poland, searching for Kasienka's father, but everyone is unfriendly except for an African neighbor and a boy Kasienka meets at the swimming pool, which is her only refuge from an alien society.

This article evaluates the asymmetric impact of exchange rate volatility on the exports of nine ECOWAS countries to the Eurozone. By comparing Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) and Nonlinear ARDL (NARDL) models, the study concludes that the effect of volatility on ECOWAS-Eurozone exports (EEE) is asymmetric. The study also investigates the impact of foreign income and prices on the EEE and categorises the goods and services that make up the EEE for each country based on their coefficients. The results show that exchange rate volatility has an asymmetric effect on the EEE, which comprise both substitute and inferior goods. The study recommends that ECOWAS authorities avoid using proportional policies to address increased and decreased volatility, as their impact on trade is asymmetric. The long-run coefficients of income for Nigeria, Togo, and Benin are -1.29, -4.67, and -2.64 respectively, indicating that their exports are dominated by inferior goods. The long-run coefficients of foreign price for Nigeria, Niger, and Burkina Faso are 5.32, 7.87, and 1.91 respectively, suggesting that their exports are mainly substitute goods. The authors confirm long-run asymmetry for three out of nine countries and short-run asymmetry for five countries. Only three countries have an asymmetric trade-volatility relationship in both the short and long run. The study suggests that Nigeria, Togo, and Benin diversify their economies, as their exports to the Eurozone are dominated by inferior goods and services. Additionally, the study recommends that the governments of Nigeria, Niger, and Burkina Faso provide support, as their goods and services are substitutes.

PurposeThis article's purpose is to examine the case for the use of the theatre arts in the evaluation of UK City of Culture (UKCC) programmes, specifically headphone verbatim.Design/methodology/approachThrough an analysis of secondary evidence, supported by some primary research, this article analyses past and present evaluation practices surrounding UKCC programmes and the case for headphone verbatim to be included as a method of gathering and distributing research data. The article also observes the challenges in how data may be disseminated through verbatim theatre performance practices, given the limited examples of its use in this context.FindingsThe author argues that the theatre arts can provide a different way of knowing and understanding the impacts of UKCC projects on the host city. Specifically, that headphone verbatim can bring an experiential perspective that is rarely if ever captured by existing UKCC evaluation methods and policymaking in general.Originality/valueThis article details an innovative method of evaluating social impacts associated with UKCC projects.