1Graduate School of Economics; 2Division of Environment and Resources, Institute of Economic Research, Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan (Correspondence to N. Ghotbi: [email protected]). Received: 21/11/03; accepted: 08/12/03 ABSTRACT We reviewed the medical and economic burden of thalassaemia major with emphasis on prenatal diagnosis for disease prevention as the most economic health care policy...

Trees outside forest (TOF) can perform a variety of social, economic and ecological functions including carbon sequestration. However, detailed quantification of tree biomass is usually limited to forest areas. Taking advantage of structural information available from stereo aerial imagery and airborne laser scanning (ALS), this research models tree biomass using national forest inventory data ...

Summery Khat is an evergreen shrub, which is cultivated as a bush or small tree; some oral traditions claim that khat originated from Yemen. However the literature indicates that khat originated from Ethiopia, specifically in Hararghe with a gradual expansion to different parts of Ethiopia, Yemen and other parts of the world. Chewing khat is both a social and a culture-based activity; it is sai...

In this paper, we explore the effectiveness of supervised learning methods in predicting the short-term viability of retail pharmaceutical businesses. We use data mining techniques such as linear discriminant analysis, k-nearest neighbour (k-NN) and the C4.5 Decision Tree to classify retail business units from the Greek pharmaceutical sector into viable and non-viable classes, while operating i...

We develop a conceptual framework for valuing biodiversity from an economic perspective. We consider biodiversity important because of a number of characteristics or services that it provides or enhances. We argue for a dynamic economic welfare measure of biodiversity that complements the existing literature on benefit-cost approaches and genetic distance/phylogenic tree approaches, which to da...

A p-facility location problems on a network N consist of locating p new facilities on N such that some function of distances among them and vertices of N is minimum. We consider a class of such problems where objective function is nondecreasing in distance. The median, the center and the centdian problems belong to this class. We prove that the optimal solution on the network and on the corresp...