Average out-of-pocket healthcare and work-loss costs of traffic injuries in Karachi, Pakistan

The objective of this study was to assess the average out-of-pocket healthcare and work-loss costs of road traffic injuries (RTI) in Karachi. In this cross-sectional study, RTI patients presenting to the five trauma centres in Karachi were contacted using stratified sampling to report their inpatient and outpatient expenses, the time spent in hospital and their average monthly income. These costs were compared among different categories of patient-related variables using analysis of variance test. Out of 341 RTI victims, two wheelers accounted for the majority of injuries (77.2%, N?=?256) followed by pedestrians (14.2%, N?=?48). Almost half of the sample patients were breadwinners (N?=?135, 45.2%), with 87.4% (N?=?118) earning less than US$ 248. Average out-of-pocket healthcare costs were US$ 271 (SD?=?440.9), which were significantly higher (P ≤ 0.026) for pedestrians (US$ 442), moderate (US$ 341.7) or severe (US$ 553.8) injury, and treatment in private hospitals (US$ 451.7). Similarly, average work loss was US$ 67.1 (SD?=?132.1), which were significantly higher (P?=?0.001) for breadwinners (US$ 99.1), moderate (US$ 130.0) or severe (US$ 157.1) injury, and treatment in private hospitals (US$ 150.0). Study results clearly showed the need to advocate RTI prevention measures in Pakistan as any such event could lead to a difficult economic situation for those involved and their family.     

Saving dynamics in the Asian countries

This paper investigates empirically the factors that have influenced the savings behavior in the fast growing Asian economies—Singapore, South Korea, Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines. Both the short and long-run movements of savings are modeled during the 1960–1997. The empirical results of the analysis based on time series data may be summarized as follows: (i) foreign savings deters domestic saving both in the short and long run; (ii) savings does not Granger cause economic growth, except for Singapore; (iii) the effect of interest rate on saving in Asian countries is inconclusive and it reflects the extent of financial liberalization adopted in these countries; and (iv) in the long run the causality runs from foreign to domestic savings.     

Christian roots of capitalist civilization

A conceptual argument is offered for the centrality of religion to the structure of capitalist civilization. This centrality is documented by examples of the role of Christianity in European civilization.     

Financial Analysis of Palestinian Industry Including Small Scale Firms

The study aims to explore the financial aspects of the Palestinian industry, and to investigate productivity and efficiency of small scale industry compared with large scale firms. In order to help policy makers in industrial planning in the new emerged Palestinian state. A special instrument has been used to collect the financial and quantitative data for the related manufacturing firms from a random sample of 215 Palestinian firms. The one way analysis of variance test was used to examine whether the mean scores differ significantly among scale sizes of the Palestinian industry concerning the selected performance measures. In addition, the Scheffe test was used as a post hoc comparison way to identify which scale size firms' performance differs than the other two scale sizes.The research revealed that small scale firms in Palestinian industry have higher labor productivity values than large scale firms, while large scale firms accomplished higher net profit margin compared to small scale industry. Creating an additional job in large scale Palestinian industry needs less cost than creating a job in small scale industry, and large scale firms have better opportunity in getting external financing than small firms.     

Time-varying Cost of Equity Capital in Southeast Asian Countries

This paper investigates variation in the cost of equity capital for the Southeast Asian countries using firm-level data over the period of 1990–2004. It is found that decreases in the firm-level cost of equity capital have been associated with stock market liberalization and securities market development. The results of the present study suggest that earlier empirical evidence regarding the decrease in the cost of equity capital using country-level data cannot be generalized to different types of firms. There has been significant time variation in the cost of equity capital within countries and across firms.     

Social capital and poverty in Uganda

This paper investigates the links between social capital and household poverty in Uganda. It assumes a two-way causal relationship between poverty and access to social capital. This suggests an endogeneity problem, so the paper uses econometric techniques that control for endogeneity. Using two nationally representative datasets, the authors' analyses revealed that access to social capital defined in terms of membership of social organisations positively affects household income and reduces poverty. Education was the key determinant of income and increases the probability of joining social networks. Their results further show that household income and welfare are positively associated with access to social capital or group participation. This suggests that government strategies to increase household income that take into consideration existing social institutions will go a long way to encourage associational growth and performance and consequently reduce poverty.     

Global Ex-vessel Fish Price Database Revisited: A New Approach for Estimating ‘Missing’ Prices

The Global Ex-vessel Fish Price Database (Ex-vessel DB) reported in Sumaila et al. (J Bioecon 9(1):39–51, 2007) was the first comprehensive database that presents average annual ex-vessel prices for all commercially exploited marine fish stocks by nationality of the fishing fleet. It contained over 30,000 reported price items, covering the period from 1950 to the present, and supplemented missing prices with estimates based on prices from a different year, species group or fleet nationality. This paper describes a revised missing price estimation approach, focused on the computation of annual average international prices for each species group, adjusted to domestic prices using the real exchange rate based on national purchasing power parity. Key advantages of the new approach are that it allows a larger number of reported prices to be used in the price estimation, and accounts for relative price level differences that exist between countries. Our new approach should improve the estimates in regions where reported prices are scarce or non-existent by linking domestic prices to the trends in international prices. Our analysis, based on the revised ex-vessel price estimates (in real 2005 USD), shows that the global marine fisheries landings have generated total value of USD 4.2 trillion since 1950, including USD 100 billion in 2005.     

The approximate purification of mixed strategies with finite observation sets

This note provides a finite result on the approximate purification of strategies in a class of two-person games.     

Approximate equilibria in markets with indivisible commodities

This paper presents results on the existence of approximate equilibria in large but finite exchange economies in which all the traders have non-convex consumption sets. As such, the paper gives a natural extension, to the finite economy, of Mas-Colell's results on existence with indivisible commodities and a continuum of agents. It also presents an approximate equilibrium theorem without any assumption of compactness or bounded non-convexity of preferences.