Repositioning the urban environment question in Zimbabwe: a review of the context,conditions and processes

This analysis is a reappraisal of two perspectives in urban development in Zimbabwe: environmental sustainability and human sustenance. The discussion seeks to reposition the conservation–survival debate by broadening it to the wider urban and national macroeconomic and sociopolitical context. It re‐examines Zimbabwe's environmental problems by examining the challenges posed by urbanisation, industrialisation and informalisation. To these ‘permanent’ strands are added the ‘transient’ phenomena of structural adjustment and indigenisation. The analysis is done within the overall national macroeconomic and sociopolitical environment. The article examines environmental sustainability and human sustenance as the two policy challenges that have to be reconciled in the quest for sustainable urban settlements in Zimbabwe. The analysis stresses that the exercise of striking a balance between the needs of humankind and those of nature has to take cognisance of the complexity of issues and the processes going on elsewhere in the urban and national context.     

Biotechnology: the emerging battlefield for US and Japanese pharmaceutical companies

The Japanese pharmaceutical industry has lagged behind the US in developing and marhting innovative new compounh. A gap anabsis rebing on international publication and patenting stahtics as well as market survgs shows that the US is the clear leader in biophannaceuticals. Recent Japanese public and private efforts to close the gap have posed no immediate threat to US pharmaceutical companies. The conflict over industrial policy among the ministries involved will take some time to be resolved. However, information networking activities and cross-border technology linkages of Japanese companies should not be underestimated. Biotechnology is current4 transforming theJapanese pharmaceutical induse, and the US will have to deal with a gowing Japanese challenge in the long run. Preventive US counter-measures should include investments in in-house biotechnology research, acquisitions of smaller biotechnology start-up ventures, global commercialization o f biophannaceuticals, and proactive management o f technology linkages with Japanese companies.     

Risk-taking incentives of executive stock options and the asset substitution problem

Various theoretical models show that managerial compensation schemes can reduce the distortionary effects of financial leverage. There is mixed evidence as to whether highly levered firms offer less stock‐based compensation, a common prediction of such models. Both the theoretical and empirical research, however, have overlooked the leverage provided by executive stock options. In principle, adjusting the exercise prices of executive stock options can mitigate the risk incentive effects of financial leverage. We show that the near‐universal practice of setting option exercise prices near the prevailing stock price at the date of grant effectively undoes most of the effects of financial leverage. In a large cross‐sectional sample of Canadian option‐granting firms, we find evidence that executives' incentives to take equity risk are negatively rather than positively related to the leverage of their employers.     

‘Gay Enclaves Face Prospect of Being PassÉ': How Assimilation Affects the Spatial Expressions of Sexuality in the United States

Journalists, activists and academics alike predict that gay neighborhoods in the United States will disappear, yet many of their claims are unsubstantiated or overly determined by economic factors. This article examines 40 years of media accounts to identify the mechanisms that explain why these urban areas are changing. I begin with the observation that the rate of assimilation of sexual minorities into mainstream society has accelerated in today's so‐called ‘post‐gay' era. Assimilation expands the residential imagination of gays and lesbians beyond the boundaries of a specific neighborhood to the entire city itself. Furthermore, as sexual orientation recedes in centrality in everyday life, residents opine that few care if a person self‐identifies as gay or straight. These two respective mechanisms of expansion and cultural sameness bring existing economic wisdom into dialogue with a cultural and political perspective about how our shifting understandings of sexuality also affect the decisions we make about where to live and socialize.     

Measuring Production and Irrigation Efficiencies of Rice Farms: Evidence from the Punjab Province,Pakistan

We employ a non‐parametric approach, data envelopment analysis, to estimate the technical and irrigation efficiency of rice farms in the Punjab Province of Pakistan. We use a cross‐sectional dataset of 80 rice growers, including 45 tube‐well owners and 35 water buyers. Mean technical efficiency scores show that tube‐well owners and water buyers are operating at fairly high efficiency levels, indicating that access to technology is not a major constraint. However, irrigation inefficiency is pronounced, with water buyers being more inefficient than tube‐well owners. A bootstrap truncated regression is used to investigate the determinants of technical and irrigation efficiency. We suggest that groundwater management policies should be designed to address efficiency enhancing factors such as knowledge of crop water consumption requirement, better credit opportunities, outreach extension services and training programs.     

A proposed configurable approach for recommendation systems via data mining techniques

This study presents a configurable approach for recommendations which determines the suitable recommendation method for each field based on the characteristics of its data, the method includes determining the suitable technique for selecting a representative sample of the provided data. Then selecting the suitable feature weighting measure to provide a correct weight for each feature based on its effect on the recommendations. Finally, selecting the suitable algorithm to provide the required recommendations. The proposed configurable approach could be applied on different domains. The experiments have revealed that the approach is able to provide recommendations with only 0.89 error rate percentage.     

Cost-effectiveness of rivaroxaban compared with enoxaparin plus a vitamin K antagonist for the treatment of venous thromboembolism

Background:

Venous thromboembolism (VTE), comprised of deep vein thrombosis (DVT) and pulmonary embolism (PE), is commonly treated with a low-molecular-weight heparin such as enoxaparin plus a vitamin K antagonist (VKA) to prevent recurrence. Administration of enoxaparin?+?VKA is hampered by complexities of laboratory monitoring and frequent dose adjustments. Rivaroxaban, an orally administered anticoagulant, has been compared with enoxaparin?+?VKA in the EINSTEIN trials. The objective was to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of rivaroxaban compared with enoxaparin?+?VKA as anticoagulation treatment for acute, symptomatic, objectively-confirmed DVT or PE.

Methods:

A Markov model was built to evaluate the costs, quality-adjusted life-years (QALYs), and incremental cost-effectiveness ratios associated with rivaroxaban compared to enoxaparin?+?VKA in adult patients treated for acute DVT or PE. All patients entered the model in the ‘on-treatment’ state upon commencement of oral rivaroxaban or enoxaparin?+?VKA for 3, 6, or 12 months. Transition probabilities were obtained from the EINSTEIN trials during treatment and published literature after treatment. A 3-month cycle length, US payer perspective ($2012), 5-year time horizon and a 3% annual discount rate were used.

Results:

Treatment with rivaroxaban cost $2,448 per-patient less and was associated with 0.0058 more QALYs compared with enoxaparin?+?VKA, making it a dominant economic strategy. Upon one-way sensitivity analysis, the model’s results were sensitive to the reduction in index VTE hospitalization length-of-stay associated with rivaroxaban compared with enoxaparin?+?VKA. At a willingness-to-pay threshold of $50,000/QALY, probabilistic sensitivity analysis showed rivaroxaban to be cost-effective compared with enoxaparin?+?VKA approximately 76% of the time.

Limitations:

The model did not account for the benefits associated with an oral and minimally invasive administration of rivaroxaban. ‘Real-world’ applicability is limited because data from the EINSTEIN trials were used in the model. Also, resource utilization and costs were based on the US healthcare system.

Conclusion:

Rivaroxaban is a cost-effective option for anticoagulation treatment of acute VTE patients.     

A near Pareto optimal auction with budget constraints

In a setup where a divisible good is to be allocated to a set of bidders with budget constraints, we introduce a mechanism in the spirit of the Vickrey auction. In the mechanism we propose, understating budgets or values is weakly dominated. Since the revenue is increasing in budgets and values, all kinds of equilibrium deviations from true valuations turn out to be beneficial to the auctioneer. We also show that ex-post Nash equilibrium of our mechanism is near Pareto optimal in the sense that all full winners? values are above all full losers? values.