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Although globally, prisoners are considered one of the vulnerable groups to tuberculosis (TB), little is known about the situation of TB in prison setting in Japan. The purpose of this paper is to examine the characteristics of TB among prisoners in Japan.

Records of TB patients from one medical prison were analyzed in terms of general demographic characteristics, clinical manifestations, risk factors and delay in diagnosis and in initiating treatment, and compared with data from the national TB surveillance and other published data on health of inmates, where appropriate. Continuous variables were compared using student independent samples t-test. Proportions were compared using χ² or Fisher exact test as appropriate. Kaplan–Meier survival analysis was conducted to determine the time from entry to prison institution to diagnosis of TB.

A total of 49 patients were analyzed. The mean age was 49.5 (±14.3) and 69.4 percent were males. Being unemployed and homeless prior to incarceration, and several co-morbidities were potential risk factors for TB (p<0.01). Analysis of diagnosis and treatment delay showed that 16.1 percent of smear positive patients took more than a week to be placed on treatment after being diagnosed of TB. Approximately 50 percent of the patients were diagnosed within four months of entering the prison institution.

Several potential risk factors identified suggest the need to strengthen screening for specific sub-groups within the prison population, such as those with poor socio-economic status and co-morbidities, as well as to consider the possible role of systematic screening for latent TB infection.

This study presents some important data to help understand the profile of TB patients in prisons in Japan, as well as showing that a detailed epidemiological analysis of existing records can provide useful insight.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the relative importance of attributes for patient selection of a medical institution and to quantitatively evaluate the impact of different types of organizational forms upon the patient ' s selection of a medical institution.

By using a conjoint analysis, evaluation criteria in patient selection of a medical institution were examined. The paper assumed the selection of a medical institution under the situation of “being given a diagnosis of suspected diabetes with a physical examination and then visiting a medical institution”. The attributes included in the questionnaire were: quality of the medical institution, distance to the hospital, amount paid at the initial visit, amount paid at hospitalization for examinations, and organizational form of the hospital. Relative importance of the attributes and relative importance of organizational form were assessed. A total of 140 people were requested to respond to the questionnaire by way of researchers who have a connection with the authors. Completed responses were obtained from 111 subjects (79 per cent).

The results of the conjoint analysis revealed that the most important attribute was quality of the medical institution. Organizational form was the attribute with the lowest importance. The utility value of being a public hospital was the highest within the organizational form attribute for all respondents and being a private hospital was the lowest. The quality of the medical institution was considered the most important factor in selecting a medical institution and the type of organizational form was considered least important. Regarding organizational form, being a public hospital was most preferred and being a hospital managed by a company and a private hospital were least preferred respectively among healthcare professionals and other occupations.

The paper provides a relative evaluation of the factors thought to be important for patients in Japan when selecting a medical institution.

This study aims to provide evidence of how budget officers use non-financial and accrual-based cost information in the budgeting process and how the usage of this information is influenced by financial constraints.

A randomized survey-based field experiment investigating budget officers in 546 Japanese local governments (LGs) was conducted. This allowed us to identify the budget officers' decision-making in the public sector budgeting process by creating and analyzing primary data with regression models.

We found that budget officers suppress budget amounts based on non-financial information of good performances. Under fiscal constraints, officers further reduce budget amounts using information on high accrual-based costs and poor non-financial performance.

Our survey-based field experiment allowed us to obtain primary data from officers making budget decisions. To the best of our knowledge, this study provides the first evidence that non-financial good and poor performance information and accrual-based cost information affect budget officers' decision-making under financial constrain.

This paper aims to investigate the relationship between locomotive syndrome (LS) and insufficient nutrient intake in young and middle-aged adults, independent of energy intake.

The authors conducted a cross-sectional survey of a non-random sample of 219 adults aged 18 to 64 (175 men and 44 women) working in two companies in Japan, between December 2018 and March 2019. LS Stage 0 was classified as No-LS while Stages 1 and 2 were classified as LS. Nutrient intake was assessed using a brief-type self-administered diet history questionnaire and adjusted to the required energy intake for each participant. The criteria for sufficient intake of 22 nutrients were based on the Dietary Reference Intake for Japanese. Logistic regression model was used to analyze the association between LS and insufficient nutrient intake.

In total, 234 employees participated in the LS examinations while 219 of them completed the questionnaire giving a response rate of 93.6%. LS Stages 1 or 2 were present in both men and women in all the age-stratified groups except for the women in their 60s. There was a significant association between LS status and insufficient intake of Vitamin K (odds ratio [95% confidence interval] 16.0 [range: 1.1–407]; p = 0.01) in women, but not in men.

The result suggests that attention should be paid to adequate Vitamin K intake in young and middle-aged women with LS. Future studies should be conducted using a larger and more diverse sample.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the present paper is the first study to show an association between LS in young and middle-aged adults and nutrients that are independent of energy intake.

This study seeks to investigate doctors' desire to change the hospital where they work to sustain higher quality care.

Self‐administered questionnaires were sent to doctors in Aichi Prefecture, Japan. Data were analyzed using univariate and logistic regression analysis and recursive partitioning.

Factors related to doctors' desire to change hospitals, according to logistic regression, were interaction between working hours and satisfaction with the hospital, evaluation, local government hospitals versus private ones, small vs large hospitals, ophthalmology versus internal medicine, desire to continue working as a hospital doctor and age. Additionally, working hours were also found to be related, based on recursive partitioning.

The response rate was low and sampling bias was observed – therefore results need careful interpretation. Also, because this was a cross‐sectional study, causal relationships could not be identified. Desire to change hospitals, but not actual behavior, was measured.

Efforts to prevent doctors from changing hospitals should include considering job satisfaction and workload, doctor evaluation methods, support for career progression and organizational management.

As the hospital doctor shortage in rural areas becomes more serious, exploring doctors' desire to leave their current hospital is meaningful for Japanese hospital managers and hospitals worldwide aiming to provide sustainable and higher quality care.

This paper aims to examine the determinant factors that influence the adoption of mobile banking by small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Palestine. The aim of this paper has supported with the objectives to identify the role of mobile banking practices in enhancing sustainable growth and development of Palestine SMEs; determining the factors that influencing the SMEs as a service and products providers’ intention to adopt mobile banking and proposing a conceptual model for adoption mobile banking development by SMEs sectors in Palestine

Hypotheses were developed guided by the technology organisation-environment (TOE) model. The primary data was collected from 408 SMEs in Palestine using questionnaires and 8 interviews.

The empirical results are based on partial least squares analysis and statistical package for the social sciences. The findings presented in this paper reveal that SMEs factors, enabling environment and business model are the main determinant factors affecting the intention to adopt mobile banking by the SMEs sector in Palestine.

The main contribution of this study is the concise identification of the obstacles and facilitators to SMEs’ mobile banking, especially in developing countries. A suggestion for further study was made. The findings could be useful to policymakers, government institutions and agencies especially in Palestine and other development partners in designing and directing their policy intervention.

This study contributes significantly to the theoretical understanding of mobile banking through the development of a mobile banking framework for the SMEs’ sector in Palestine. A major contribution of this study is to the existing knowledge and literature in mobile banking by developing a TOE framework for providers (supply-side) factors in general and in particular in Palestine to fill the gaps in past studies.

This is an unusual book and a striking phenomenon. It comprises a collection of thirteen essays on the German Historical School of Economics (henceforth GHSE), exclusively written by Japanese contributors who are mainly full professors at leading universities and mostly have already published on various aspects of the GHSE. The editor, Yuichi Shionoya, is well known internationally as one of the most prominent students of Joseph Schumpeter and Max Weber, whose works provide the basis for the editor’s attempt to erect the framework of the rational reconstruction of the GHSE in the opening essay. This holds in particular for economic sociology, which – besides theory, history and statistics – constitutes the fourth discipline in economics, and includes the social institutions relevant to economic behaviour and also political, legal or religious aspects. The investigation of Schumpeter’s conception of economic sociology (see, e.g. Schumpeter, 1954, pp. 20–21) is at the very heart of Shionoya’s second essay (9) in which the author concludes that Schumpeter combined two essential elements of the GHSE, a belief in the unity of social life and the inseparable relationship among its components and a concern for development, with some stimulus by Max Weber’s analysis of comparative-static social systems and Marx’s analysis of the dynamic process of capital accumulation. It is Shionoya’s belief “that Schumpeter should be regarded as one of the successors of the German Historical School because he attempted a rational reconstruction of that school, especially Schmoller’s research program, in terms of economic sociology and made his own contribution from this perspective” (p. 9). Whether and how this statement from the editor’s first essay fully fits with the one from Shionoya’s second essay, that “Schumpeter’s conception of economic sociology intended to integrate history and theory, the antitheses at the Methodenstreit between Gustav von Schmoller and Carl Menger” (p. 139), is left to the reader’s judgement. Characteristically, the contradictions involved can be found in Schumpeter’s own writings. In the very same year, 1926, in which he published the article “Gustav von Schmoller and the Problems of Today,” which forms the key basis for Shionoya’s argument, Schumpeter eliminated the seventh chapter on “The Overall View of the Economy” of the first German edition of The Theory of Economic Development from the second German one and omitted it in all later editions of the book, including the 1934 English translation. The reason was that Schumpeter believed that this chapter with its much broader perspective and its fragment of cultural sociology has sometimes distracted the reader’s attention from pure and “dry” economic reasoning. It had led to a kind of consent which was at the very opposite of his intentions in so far as the seventh chapter was misunderstood as an alternative to economic theory. For that kind of reasoning Schumpeter did not want to provide any ammunition. For Shionoya, on the other hand, Chap. 7 is not a fragment of cultural sociology but a research program for a universal social science that he has specified in an earlier article (Shionoya, 1990) in which he regrets Schumpeter’s decision to omit it.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the effect of an educational intervention to increase vegetable consumption by university students.

This study is an open, parallel randomized controlled trial for 25 weeks. University students aged 18-24 years were divided into an intervention group (n=52) and a control group (n=52). Vegetable intake was assessed using a questionnaire.

On investigation, the results indicated that the vegetable intake of the intervention group was well maintained at the end of the study, whereas that of the control group was significantly decreased by the seasonal change. This research showed that using three educational projects could significantly improve the vegetable consumption of university students.

These results suggest that the educational approach is a promising method to improve the vegetable consumption status, particularly the consumption of green and yellow vegetables, by university students.

This parallel randomized controlled study investigated intervention via educational approaches, including a lecture on the nutritional significance of vegetable intake, a tour of an agricultural farm, and learning of cooking skills, focusing on increasing the consumption of vegetables by university students. Although there have been many intervention studies aimed at improving intake of vegetables in the world, there have been no intervention studies on the vegetable intake of young adults in Japan.