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The purpose of this paper is to report on current developments in user involvement in healthcare in Slovenia and to explore the issue from the macro-, mezzo- and micro-levels.

User involvement is first contextualised within history of the organisation of healthcare system, from its socialist past through to its post-transitional developments. Second, user involvement is tracked through an analysis of healthcare policies and legislation as well as at its institutional and organisational levels. Finally, user involvement practices are illustrated from the perspective of individual patients. A descriptive and exploratory case study design was employed, including a literature review, document analysis and qualitative thematic analysis of nine in-depth and four semi-structured interviews.

The findings reveal a complex and at times ambivalent picture in which user involvement is still not firmly embedded into the healthcare system, despite being generally accepted.

No systematic qualitative research of patient involvement in Slovenia has previously been published. This research will establish a basis for further investigations of the topic.

Personal characteristics, such as age, marital status, education level and gender, vary among elderly residents in residential apartments. These characteristics may influence the elderly residents’ satisfaction with the facilities provided in their residential apartments. To ensure appropriate facilities management (FM) items are provided for the different categories of elderly people, it is necessary to understand their basic needs. Therefore, this paper aims to compare the satisfaction with FM items among elderly people with different personal characteristics in private domestic (PD) buildings.

A questionnaire survey was conducted among elderly people with different personal characteristics in PD buildings to collect information about their levels of satisfaction with FM items. A total of 41 FM items and four characteristics of the elderly, namely, age, gender, marital status and education, were identified in this study.

The result shows that satisfaction with natural daylight was significantly different among elderly people of different genders, while the one-way between-groups ANOVA indicate that satisfaction with the size of bedrooms, turning spaces at doors, temperature in bathrooms and/or toilets, colour, accessibility and ease of closing or opening the doors were significantly different among elderly people belonging to different age groups and of different marital status and education level.

Designers and private developers are therefore recommended to increase the sizes of bedrooms, install windows on opposite sides of walls in the flats and ensure there is an adequate light reflection ratio for wall and floor colours, to accommodate elderly people’s special characteristics.

A major problem in using current best‐match methods in a filtering task is that of setting appropriate thresholds, which are required in order to force a binary decision on notifying a user of a document. We discuss methods for setting such thresholds and adapting them as a result of feedback information on the performance of the profile. These methods fit within the probabilistic approach to retrieval, and are applied to a probabilistic system. Some experiments, within the framework of the TREC‐7 adaptive filtering track, are described.

The complexity of the financial markets and their controlling entities make structural reforms highly problematic and controversial. This paper aims to address the deficiencies of the credit rating agency (CRA) market. The contribution of this paper to this long and ongoing discussion is a reform concept that is based on the introduction of a new public entity.

The design is based on the market deficiencies and structural issues defined by numerous other researchers.

The proposed market reform is based on the introduction of an entity that mainly acts as a communication layer which takes over the contract distribution and payment organization between the issuers and the agencies. The distribution of products for ratings gets anonymized and randomized, which eliminates most conflicts of interest that prevent the market players from performing as they should. This process changes the market fundamentally, but it does not impact either side’s capacity to make profit.

The concept can hence solve most issues of the market, but not all.

The concept is a first step toward necessary reform, and this paper fuels a new discussion about a valid CRA market reform. The reform proposal mentioned in this paper focuses on the European Union, but the structure is easily adaptable to other markets.

The structure introduced in this paper is a new concept that has not been proposed before.

This paper aims to investigate the pass-through (PT) effect in Turkey by using quarterly data for the period 1998: Q1-2019: Q2 to understand the dynamic potential effects of exchange rates on domestic prices.

The paper launches several nonlinear models in which the basic determinants of domestic prices in Turkey are determined through Markov regime-switching models (MSMs). Hence, this research follows the variables of the consumer price index (CPI), USD exchange rate, gross domestic product (GDP; demand side of the economy), industrial production index (production side of the economy), economic uncertainty and geopolitical risk index for Turkey.

This work explores that the exchange rate and demand side of the economy (GDP) follow a positive nonlinear relationship with CPI at both regimes. The production side of the economy (IP) affects negatively the CPI during regime 0. Economic uncertainty influences the CPI positively at Regime 1, while geopolitical risk has a negative association with CPI at Regime 0. Eventually, the paper provides some policy proposals associated with the impacts of GDP, IP, economic uncertainty and geopolitical risk on CPI in Turkey.

One may claim that any PT model, which does not observe the possible structural or regime shifts in estimated parameters, might fail to estimate the coefficients unbiasedly and efficiently. Hence, this work differs from available relevant works in the literature since this paper considers linearity or nonlinearity important and reveals that the relevant PT model follows a nonlinear path rather than a linear path, this nonlinear path is converged strongly by MSMs and estimates the significant regime shifts in the constant term and, in parameters of independent variables of PT by MSMs.

This paper aims to analyze the pattern of public debt in Brazil, Russian Federation, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) in a comparative perspective. Besides, an attempt is made to verify the existence of debt overhang as suggested by Krugman (1988) among BRICS nations.

Annual panel data for BRICS for the period 1980-2016 has been used for the analysis. Percentage ratio method has been used to analyze the pattern of debt. Panel covariate augmented Dickey–Fuller (pCADF) test has been used to verify the time series properties of the variable, while panel cointegration test of Pedroni (1999) is used to check the existence of any co-integrating vector among the variables. Panel Granger causality test is used to check the causality between the variables.

Co-integration result suggests that there exists a strong long-run equilibrium relationship between debt service, domestic savings, capital formation and economic growth of BRICS nations. From Granger causality test, it is observed that domestic savings and capital formation are Granger caused by debt servicing. The coefficients from fully modified ordinary least squares measure a negative impact of debt service on gross capital formation and gross domestic saving. This suggests that the payment for debt service affects capital formation and gross domestic savings adversely. Thus, it gives primary signals for debt overhang effect in BRICS nations.

Allowing debt service to negatively affect the investment and potential investment will result in slowdown or stagnation in economic growth in the long run, so strategies need to be taken in BRICS nations to check the adverse effects of rising level of debt-service-payment-to-gross national income ratio on domestic savings and capital formation. BRICS nations need to reduce their debt service payment by undertaking appropriate strategy of debt overhaul and fiscal management so that domestic savings and capital formation in the country will not be adversely affected. Besides, BRICS nations need to take measures to augment its domestic savings and capital formations.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no published works have analyzed the pattern of public debt for BRICS (major developing nations). Debt servicing is also not checked for BRICS in recent papers, considering overhang approach.

The purpose of this paper is to capture the pattern of return volatility and information spillover and the extent of conditional correlation among the stock markets of leading South American economies. It also examines the connectedness of market returns within the region.

The time series properties of weekly stock market returns of benchmark indices spanning from the second week of 1995 to the fourth week of December 2015 are analyzed. Using univariate auto-regressive conditional heteroscedastic, generalized auto-regressive conditional heteroscedastic, and dynamic conditional correlation multivariate GARCH model approaches, the study finds evidence of returns and volatility linkages along with the degree of connectedness among the markets.

The findings of this study are consistent with increasing market connectedness among a group of leading South American economies. Stocks exhibit relatively fewer asymmetries in conditional correlations in addition to conditional volatility; yet, the asymmetry is relatively less apparent in integrated markets. The results demonstrate that co-movements are higher toward the end of the sample period than in the early phase. The stock markets of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Peru are closely and strongly connected within the region followed by Colombia, whereas Venezuela is least connected with the group.

The implication is that foreign investors may benefit from the reduction of the risk by adding the stocks to their investment portfolio.

The unique features of the paper include a large sample of national stock returns with updated time series data set that reveals the time series properties and empirical evidence on volatility testing. Unlike other studies, this paper uncovers the relation between the stock markets within the same region facing the same market condition.

Libraries need to develop information processing systems for evaluation, budgeting, planning, and operations. Electronic spreadsheets lend themselves to a variety of applications, but are time‐consuming to create. A model template and macros that can be used in many different types of library data analysis have been developed here. The procedures demonstrated here can build an essential set of tools for meeting fundamental goals of administrative efficiency, effective use of library resources, staff motivation, and rational policy making.

Factors affecting bid/no-bid decisions of international projects are more complex than those of domestic projects. The purpose of this paper is to identify and rank decision factors considered by variously sized Chinese international contractors (CICs) and categorize those groups of factors important to experienced practitioners.

The analysis of factors identified by a literature review is conducted based on data derived from questionnaire results received from 119 CIC project and bidding managers. The relative importance of factors is measured by mean value and standard deviation. The discrepancy in rank and importance value perceived by variously sized CICs are explored by ranking disparity analysis, non-parametric test and Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient test. Finally, factor analysis is used to categorize the underlying groups of factors considered by CICs.

In sum, 41 factors are identified through the literature review as having an impact on the bid decision. Significant disparities in ranking and importance are found in several factors, which partially affect the consistency of the ranking of factors perceived between large and small-medium CICs. Ultimately, nine major factors are identified as impacting the bidding decision, with “contractor’s capability” and “country risk of the host country,” being the most important.

The weight of a factor considered in a decision varies across contractors as a function of contractor size. Whether using models or subjective judgment in making decisions, it is beneficial to fully understand the main groups of factors influencing the decision. Vulnerability to country risk emerges as the first criterion accessed in the bid decision.

A comprehensive set of factors is established for CICs, including both general factors common to domestic projects, and international factors unique to international projects. All factors are grouped by inferential analysis from the perspective of contractors, which reveals the underlying mechanism of the bid decision-making process. While the data were collected from CICs, the methodology in exploring factors, along with implications, is determined to be applicable internationally.