The problems of supplying water to third world cities: Bulawayo's water crisis

The current drought in central and southern Africa has focused attention on issues relating to the provision and supply of potable water. In the case of Bulawayo, Zimbabwe's second city, there is the very real prospect that water supplies may be exhausted before the onset of the next rainy season. This paper explores the background to this problem and shows how poor planning, financial constraints, and political intransigence have failed to keep pace with a policy aimed at the provision of water to the inhabitants in this expanding urban environment Alternative sources of supply. in particular a pipeline to the Zambezi River, are also investigated.     

Analyzing Cost Differences in Life Insurance

Several indexes for comparing the cost of life insurance policies are currently available. A variety of criticisms of these indexes has been offered. This paper identifies an additional problem: consumers may lack confidence in index values because they do not reconcile with data about company performance (e.g., lapse ratios, returns on invested assets). Analysis results suggest that policy costs are as much a function of actuarial manipulation for marketing advantage as of commonly cited textbook factors (mortality, interest, expenses) and competitive factors (lapse ratio, average policy size).     

Recreation Vehicles: The Economics of Ownership

A breakeven point analysis of selected modes of recreational travel in which the costs of ownership and travel use of representative self-contained recreation vehicles are compared with the costs of lodging and travel by private automobile.     

Erstens: ignorieren, zweitens: diffamieren, drittens: umarmen?

Mass media are an essential factor for the success of small parties, for the media can act in a supporting or an inhibiting way towards these parties. This could be observed for the example of the German Green Party: As the Greens were becoming more and more important in the parliaments, the media changed their formerly very critical view of the party to a more factual and positive reporting. Is the party “Die Linke” now experiencing a similar process? The present study analyses the comments of three national German newspapers from 2005 to 2009, using a quantitative content analysis with the aim of bringing to light how the media acted towards “Die Linke”. The results show that commenting has hardly changed since earlier studies were published. Factual issues only play a marginal role, and the party is judged negatively in all newspapers, with the tageszeitung slightly distinct from the other two papers, though.     

The dynamics of socioeconomic reform in Russia: Medico-demographic indices

A medico-demographic periodization of Russian socioeconomic reforms is presented, according to which the state of public health is characterized by different vectors.     

Toward the assessment of the Russian population mortality risk factors and the feasibility of their reduction: Comments on the World Bank Report “Dying Too Young”

A comparative study of external mortality risk factors according to World Bank experts (Dying Too Young Report, 2005) and findings of other projects, as well as mortality reduction programs, is presented. The World Bank experts overrate the significance of smoking and lead pollution as mortality factors and underrate that of alcohol, air pollution, and unfavorable occupational environments. In addition, the impacts of radon, climate warming, and low temperatures, which are very important negative factors for Russia, are overlooked in the Report. Although mortality reduction measures are very topical under the current demographic crisis, certain federal target programs envisage very general measures, and the death rate remains high. Road Safety Improvement, which is the most concrete among these programs, may indeed help reduce road accident-related mortality. The importance of air pollution as a risk factor may grow as a result of changes in the structure of the fuel balance and an increased share of coal combustion.