The APJCP Impact Factor for 2012 is 1.271, returning from 0.659 for 2011 (1.240 for 2010 and 1.108 for 2009). For an Asian Pacific journal publishing over 100 papers a month from countries with very varied resources it is heartening and we thank all those who continued to submit papers and cite references in the APJCP through our difficult period. However, we still have very much room for impro...

Financial corporations provide financial services that may be paid for explicitly or implicitly. Explicit financial services are directly observable as charges mainly in association with the acquisition and disposal of financial assets and liabilities or with insurance and pension schemes. However, any complete measurement of the production of financial services has to take account of the value...

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Direct out-of-pocket payments for healthcare continue to be a major source of health financing in low-income and middle-income countries. Some of these direct payments take the form of informal charges paid by patients to access the needed healthcare services. Remarkably, however, little is known about the extent to which these payments are exercised and their determinants in the context of Sub...

We ask whether increasing HMO penetration causes hospitals to cut back on charity care using California hospital discharge data for 1988-1996. There is little evidence at the hospital level that private hospitals respond to HMOs by turning away uninsured and/or Medicaid patients. In the for-profit sector hospitals actually reduce the share of privately insured patients and increase the shares o...

Direct evidence has been lacking on entrepreneurs’ response to individual-specific opportunities, and recent work suggests that entrepreneurship may be a non-profit-seeking activity and that entrepreneurs evaluate risk oddly. We model heterogeneous inventors and inventions, outside opportunities, sunk and non-sunk costs, and risk, to guide data analysis. We use assessment data from a center pai...

What is Islamic Finance? There are at least three characteristics which makes it different from the conventional debt finance. First, it prohibits riba or interest, or in other words a fixed and pre-determined rate of return to be paid on the deposits or to be received from the borrowers. The rate of return is variable and determined by the profit and loss that the bank makes during a given per...

A fundamental aspect of any open payment system is the interchange fee that is paid from the merchant’s bank to the cardholder’s bank. Using a model in which there is partial participation by heterogeneous consumers and merchants, this paper characterizes the output maximizing, profit maximizing and welfare maximizing level of such an interchange fee. It examines how the optimal level of the fe...

Resource provisioning plays a major role in the cloud computing environment due to increased number of cloud users. The user satisfaction level can be improves in the considerable manner by provisioning the resources to the users which can process them with more profit. In this research work, resource provisioning is done with the consideration of the objective called profit. The profit of clou...

We propose a dynamic model for studying the time evolution of fish stocks in an environment divided into two adjacent zones with different fishing policies. We analyze two particular harvesting methods: constant fishing effort and profit maximization. In this case, some agents engage in competition based on maximization of individual profit whereas others cooperate. The asymptotic behavior of t...