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.     

Approximating the Effective Protection Coefficient without Reference to Technological Data

When proposals for reform of tariff or subsidy policies aremade, attempts to predict the effect on incentives are frequentlyhampered by the need for input-output technical data. This articledevelops and illustrates the use of a methodology for approximatingeffective protection coefficients (EPCs) when such data areunavailable or outdated. It derives the equations which approximatethe EPC from statistical analysis of a cross section of existingEPC studies for four agricultural commodities: corn, cotton,rice, and wheat. Informational requirements for computing approximationsinclude the nominal protection coefficients on output and tradableinputs and readily available macroeconomic data. These approximationequations perform well in an out-of-sample test.     

SAC 4 And The Challenge To The Mandatory Status Of Concepts Statements

This paper expresses no doubt about the worth of concepts statements such as Statement of Accounting Concepts SAC 4 Definition and Recognition of the Elements of Financial Statements, which spells out the essential characteristics of assets, liabilities, equity, revenues and expenses along with broad criteria for their recognition in financial statements. However, the authors have reservations about giving mandatory status to such a statement. It is, after all, but one piece of a conceptual framework and as the other pieces take shape they may call for alterations in the interpretation and operation of the elements. Without the benefit of the light which might be cast by reference to other concepts statements, SAC 4 in isolation could lead to undebated and questionable consequences, as well as supplying equivocal guidance on many important issues. This paper examines the reasons for unrest about the mandatory status of concepts statements.     

PSYCHOLOGICAL CONTRACTS AND JOB SATISFACTION: CLUSTERING ANALYSIS USING EVIDENTIAL C‐MEANS AND COMPARISON WITH OTHER TECHNIQUES

The psychological contract refers to an individual employee's belief in mutual obligations between them and their employer. Psychological contracts are a key management concern, as they can impact employees' attitudes and behaviors in ways that influence organizational efficiency and effectiveness. In this paper, we analyse the relationship between the psychological contract and facets of job satisfaction among non‐profit sector employees, using the nascent non‐hierarchical evidential c‐means (ECM) clustering technique. To date, this technique has been theoretically discussed but not widely applied. Based on the Dempster–Shafer theory of evidence, ECM is novel in facilitating the assignment of objects, not only to single clusters, but to sets of clusters, and no clusters (outliers). The paper compares the theoretical underpinnings and findings from ECM with those of three other well‐known clustering techniques, namely (1) the hierarchical Ward's method, (2) the non‐hierarchical crisp k‐means and (3) the non‐hierarchical fuzzy c‐means approaches. We present and interpret the cluster solutions from each clustering technique. We establish three clusters differentiated by the content of the employees' psychological contracts. These clusters are validated by considering their relationship with facets of job satisfaction, to ensure the clusters are theoretically meaningful. Comparisons of the findings from each technique: (1) provide insights into the relationship between the psychological contract and job satisfaction; (2) reveal what ECM encompasses, relative to other clustering techniques; (3) inform the selection of an appropriate clustering technique for a specific research problem; and (4) demonstrate potential future directions in the development of cluster analysis. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.