A 1994 opinion survey again shows Americans less satisfied with their health care system than Canadians and (West) Germans are with theirs. Americans also report more problems in paying for care and receiving needed services. However, overall satisfaction in Canada and Germany has fallen. Important cultural differences between the countries were identified. Americans have higher expectations fo...

The World Bank Group consists of five organizations: the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), the International Development Association (IDA), the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA), and the International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID). The World Bank operates under the authority of a Bo...

How to improve healthcare system’ efficiency has been highly concerned by Chinese government. The objectives of this paper are to establish production function of medical service and analyze returns to scale; to measure technical efficiency; and to highlight possible policy implications of the results for policy makers. Stochastic Frontier Approach (SFA) is employed in this paper based on data ...

The Instituto Venezolano de Investigaciones Cientificas (IVIC) is a government-funded multidisciplinary academic institution dedicated to research, development and technology in many areas of knowledge. Biomedical projects and publications comprise about 40% of the total at IVIC. In this article, we present an overview of some selected research and development projects conducted at IVIC which w...

The Pasteur Institute of Iran was inaugurated on August 24, 1921 in Tehran. This new institution was established on the request of the Iranian government with the agreement and scientific support of the French authorities under the supervision of Professor Pierre Paul Emile Roux (1853 - 1933), the General Director of the Paris Pasteur Institute of the time. The Iranian institute was inaugurated...

Consider an institutional service that could be defined by the countries government or board of education. Each participating college or university could later implement the service on a local basis. Users would discover the available services in a directory through some kind of search facility and develop front-end applications. Receiving the data in a standardized format allows the informatio...

Call routing refers to the technique of automatically relaying a customer’s telephone enquiry to the appropriate destination, using computational speech and language processing techniques. The potential benefits of such a technology are obvious to anyone who has used the slow and frustrating systems which are currently universally provided when one telephones a company, institution, government ...

Introduction Janani Suraksha Yojana (JSY), a maternity protection scheme, aims to reduce maternal and infant mortality and to promote institutional delivery in India. It was started in 2005. Under JSY, pregnant mothers of poor, scheduled caste and tribes shall get financial benefits of INR 500 (USD 10.7) after completing three antenatal care visits; INR 150 (USD 3.2) to INR 350 (USD 6.4) for tr...

the major objective of this article is to introduce the institution of ombudsman as one of the most common institutions in administrative law in many countries. having this goal in mind, in the first section, the authors endeavor to analyze the course of development of the institution of ombudsman, as well as its significance and functions. in the second section, they present a score of cases o...

a stochastic frontier cost function indicates that the annual cost of complying with the anti-redlining Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) is $171,000 per thrift institution, roughly 2.3 percent of variable costs. But compliance cost is significantly less than the estimated 21 percent cost inefficiency. Based on published estimates of the incremental number of mortgage loans induced by CRA, the m...