A hospital without walls

Pacific Presbyterian Medical Center has chalked up an impressive string of successes. What's ahead? A $20 million cancer center.     

Socio‐economic factors determining the success achieved among cotton‐adopting households in two magisterial districts of KwaZulu

The aim of the paper is to investigate certain aspects of the post‐adoption behaviour of dryland cotton farmers in the Ubombo and Hlabisa magisterial districts of KwaZulu. Particular attention is paid to the socio‐economic determinants of the success (returns per hectare) of the household cotton enterprise.

Multi‐stage sampling methods were used to draw a random sample of fifty cotton‐farming households from each of the two study districts. The data were collected by interview survey and analysed using principal components and regression techniques.

Results suggest that the success of the household enterprise in both areas is largely determined by the socio‐economic environment under which the producer operates. The most important success‐determining factors are those relating to the human capital endowments and economic status of the household.     

A Stochastic Frontier Production Function with Flexible Risk Properties

This paper considers a stochastic frontier production function which has additive, heteroscedastic error structure. The model allows for negative or positive marginal production risks of inputs, as originally proposed by Just and Pope (1978). The technical efficiencies of individual firms in the sample are a function of the levels of the input variables in the stochastic frontier, in addition to the technical inefficiency effects. These are two features of the model which are not exhibited by the commonly used stochastic frontiers with multiplicative error structures.An empirical application is presented using cross-sectional data on Ethiopian peasant farmers. The null hypothesis of no technical inefficiencies of production among these farmers is accepted. Further, the flexible risk models do not fit the data on peasant farmers as well as the traditional stochastic frontier model with multiplicative error structure.