Drug selection: Mozambique

Whereas a few hundred generic drugs are essential for health care, the international and many national markets are flooded with tens of thousands of brand-name preparations. This numerical difference is because of the many imitative products, drug combinations, brandname duplications, and drugs with low therapeutic value and/or unacceptable adverse effects. Since independence Mozambique has reduced the number of registered products, including those for retail pharmacy sale, from some 26,000 to about 1200. An effective national formulary has been introduced for health service use and now contains only 343 distinct therapeutic substances. The formulary uses only international non-proprietary names, and has been used to rationalize state pharmaceutical procurement with cost savings and to improve drug information and use.     

Einzelbesprechungen

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

An Empirical Analysis of the Effect of Financial Distress on Trade Credit

This paper studies the use of supplier's trade credit by firms in financial distress. Trade credit represents a large portion of firms’ short‐term financing and plays an important role in financial distress. We find that firms in financial distress use a significantly larger amount of trade credit to substitute for alternative sources of financing. Firms that are smaller, with less market power, and with more unique products tend to use more trade credit financing when in distress. We also find that firms that significantly increase their trade payables when in financial distress, experience an additional drop of at least 11% in sales and profitability growth over the previously documented 21% average drop for financially troubled firms.     

Technical efficiency of UK airports

In this paper, the random stochastic frontier model is used to estimate the technical efficiency of UK airports. The airports are ranked according to their productivity for the period 2000–2005 and homogenous and heterogeneous variables in the cost function are disentangled. These changes the ranking of the efficiency of UK airports compared to more conventional measures.     

Export market re-entry: Time-out period and price/quality dynamisms

The relevance of nonlinear internationalisation regarding exporting activities and the performance post re-entry remains little understood. This study develops a two-stage model to explain the process of exporting firms’ exit and re-entry decisions regarding individual export markets. Specifically, it investigates the dynamic relationships between exit and re-entry stages by focusing on the time-out period. This study empirically tests the decision model by employing export data from the Chinese Customs for the period 2000-2009. The results indicate the importance of the exit stage in shaping re-entry decisions, price/quality ratio and export performance, where time-out period plays a significant role in varying these effects.     

Balanced portfolio via signed graphs and spectral clustering in the Brazilian stock market

Quality & Quantity - A portfolio associated with a balanced signed graph that contains both positive and negative edges is more predictable and risk-averse, and is therefore likely to require...     

CONTINUOUS PREFERENCE ORDERINGS REPRESENTABLE BY UTILITY FUNCTIONS

This paper surveys the conditions under which it is possible to represent a continuous preference ordering using utility functions. We start with a historical perspective on the notions of utility and preferences, continue by defining the mathematical concepts employed in this literature, and then list several key contributions to the topic of representability. These contributions concern both the preference orderings and the spaces where they are defined. For any continuous preference ordering, we show the need for separability and the sufficiency of connectedness and separability, or second countability, of the space where it is defined. We emphasize the need for separability by showing that in any nonseparable metric space, there are continuous preference orderings without utility representation. However, by reinforcing connectedness, we show that countably boundedness of the preference ordering is a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of a (continuous) utility representation. Finally, we discuss the special case of strictly monotonic preferences.     

Ex post evaluation of PPP government-led renegotiations: Impacts on the financing of road infrastructure

Renegotiations are often claimed to be the major pitfall in public–private partnership projects. In fact, the literature and empirical evidence suggest a bias toward favoring concessionaires, although there are well-known examples of harmful unilateral decisions by governments. This article establishes a distinction between structural renegotiations (with changes in the risk-sharing agreement) and nonstructural renegotiations (without shifting risk) and analyzes the implications of structural renegotiations in a road concession by comparing the ex ante and ex post financial implications for government, concessionaire, and users. The selected project is one that started as a shadow toll and was later changed to real toll. The analysis shows that the renegotiation essentially transferred costs to the users. The financial burden for the government decreased and the internal rate of return (IRR) of the concessionaire increased slightly although the overall risk profile of the concession decreased. The users supported a 40% higher cost, and the system gained an additional cost component (the electronic tolling system). Overall the global financial costs increased 40% when compared with the initial regime. The article also sets out some discussions and implications for policymakers.     

The Role of Informational and Congruence Clues in Advertisement for an Ethnic Restaurant

This study analyzes the effect of informational clues and Chef-Cuisine congruence, and their relation to advertisements for a Japanese restaurant. Two experiments were conducted with 171 consumers. Findings supported the following: Congruence between a Japanese restaurant and Japanese Chef results in higher approval ratings than the combination of Japanese restaurant with Brazilian Chef. However, if the advertisement states that the restaurant has won an award, then Chef-restaurant congruence is no longer an important factor in consumers’ evaluations.