BACKGROUND Physical inactivity is a major risk factor for many chronic diseases including diabetes, cardiovascular diseases and some cancers. It is estimated that, in Australia, physical inactivity contributes to 13,500 annual deaths and incurs an annual cost of AU$ 21 billion to the health care system. The cost of physical inactivity to the Western Australian (WA) economy is estimated to be ab...

OBJECTIVES There is an urgent need to understand how to improve targeting of artemisinin combination therapy (ACT) to patients with confirmed malaria infection, including subsidised ACTs sold over-the-counter. We hypothesised that offering an antimalarial subsidy conditional on a positive malaria rapid diagnostic test (RDT) would increase uptake of testing and improve rational use of ACTs. ME...

OBJECTIVE To describe the financial burden on TB patients for transportation during treatment, and to evaluate the impacts of the "transportation subsidy initiative on poor TB patients" in rural China for improving poor patients' access to TB treatment. METHODS A Case-cohort of 429 TB patients was investigated through questionnaire interviews in four counties of two provinces in China. Inform...

The aim of the thesis is to describe how the minimum biofuel requirement affects the monopolistic oil markets. This is an increasingly important questions, because the governments are smoothing the biofuel’s way into the fuel markets for both the economical and environmental reasons. The focus in this thesis is mainly on the minimum biofuel requirement, but at times that policy is compared also...

We investigate the optimal investment decision in renewables under market demand uncertainty, in the context of the Italian strategy for renewable deployment under the EU policy. Upon investing, the firm has to decide about the time and size of the investment. We find that a higher subsidy level induces the firm to invest earlier with a smaller investment capacity. This implies that a given env...

BACKGROUND The problem posed by therapeutic injection is a clinical practice issue that influences health care quality and patient safety. Although sufficient government subsidy was one of the 12 key interventions to promote rational drug use initiated by WHO (World Health Organization), limited information is available about the association between government subsidy and injection use in prima...

In this paper, we present an analytical model to investigate how the optimal production strategy of new energy vehicles (NEVs) is influenced by subsidy, market fluctuation, and loss aversion. We find that a loss averse decision maker may produce more production quantity than the optimal quantity in risk neutrality under the certain conditions. We demonstrate that the expected utility is substan...

This paper examines the impact of the Chinese recycling subsidy policy (CRS-policy) on the recycling and reuse industry across the whole product life cycle. We propose a closed-loop dynamic system to illustrate the production flow and interactions among various industry and market factors. A simulation analysis is conducted using data on gas auto engines in China to evaluate the effectiveness o...

The electrification of heat using pumps with renewable power presents an attractive and technically feasible pathway for decarbonising heating. However, until now, the uptake has been much slower than fossil-fuel-based heating, particularly in UK. To accelerate use national-scale decarbonisation, this study proposes new approaches to synthesise high-quality temporospatial energy datasets (e.g. ...