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As a result of the aging of American society, health care costs have been and will continue to rise, to the extent that they are not sustainable. Obviously, this trend will continue in spite of the 2010 health care reform. As a result of this uncontrollable problem, writers such as Daniel Callahan have proposed age‐based rationing of health care while utilizing the utilitarian notions of ethics and justice. However, other writers, utilizing more egalitarian notions of justice, have opposed this. This suggests an ethical dilemma, which has to be debated in the future. The author believes professors teaching health care related courses will be instrumental in this debate, explaining why she decided to seek the opinion of a sample of 18 professors regarding this issue. The purpose of this paper is to report on the results of this research.

Qualitative methodology, specially grounded theory, was used in this study that sought to explore the views of 18 full‐time professors who teach health care policy and administration in Northeast Pennsylvania about age‐based rationing of health care. Qualitative research is very useful uncovering the views of individuals as they relate to their experiences. In the study, professors were asked 14 questions by the author, four of these being demographic. The remaining ten questions, open ended ones, sought the opinions of these professors about their support or opposition to age‐based rationing.

The author's interviews of those 18 professors and the analysis of the responses, which revealed the complexity and multidimensional nature of the issue, led to the emergence of eight different themes.

The author used a qualitative method of research, interviewing 18 professors, to uncover personal views not previously published.

The purpose of this paper is to estimate the impact of credit rationing on the amount of capital allocated to inputs used by rice farmers in the Mekong River Delta (MRD).

Based on the literature review, the authors propose nine hypotheses on the determinants of access of rice farmers to credit and four hypotheses on the impact of credit rationing on the amount of capital allocated to inputs used by rice farmers in the MRD. Data were collected from 1,168 farmer households randomly selected out of 10 provinces (city) in the MRD.

Step 1 of propensity score matching (PSM) with probit regression shows that land value, income, education, gender of household head and geographical distance to the nearest credit institution affect the degree of credit rationing facing rice farmers. Step 2 of PSM estimator identifies that the amount of capital allocated to inputs such as fertilizer and hired labour increases when credit rationing decreases while that allocated to seed and pesticide is not influenced by credit rationing because rice farmers use these inputs adamantly regardless of effectiveness.

This paper sheds light on the impact of credit rationing on the amount of capital allocated to inputs used by rice farmers, which is largely different from the main focus of the extant literature just on the determinants of credit rationing facing farmers in general and rice farmers in particular.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate credit rationing across firms in euro zone countries, as it relates to its own sovereign credit ratings.

The authors utilize firm-level data from the Survey on Access to Finance of Enterprises for the period 2009-2013 conducted by the European Central Bank.

A negative association between the rating of sovereign creditworthiness and credit rationing is identified, while credit rationing varies substantially even among countries with the highest quality of sovereign bonds. Credit rationing is lower in sovereigns with high-quality ratings and higher in sovereigns near default. These results remain intact when fundamental firm characteristics (e.g. firm’s age and size, sector of economic activity, financial situation, etc.) are taken into consideration. This indicates that the interconnection of sovereign debt risk with domestic credit market outcomes is robust.

The present study contributes to the relevant literature by performing a detailed analysis of credit rationing for euro zone SMEs and by exploring the link between sovereign credit rating and credit rationing during the sovereign debt crisis period.

The purpose of this paper is to determine the extent of risk rationing among potential rural borrowers in Mexico and China.

Using primary survey data from 730 farm households in the Shaanxi province of China and from 372 farmers in northeastern Mexico, the authors investigate factors associated with risk rationed, price rationed and quantity rationed farmers. The survey was instrumented to self-identify borrower typologies. In addition the authors created within the survey a discrete-choice credit demand build to determine borrower credit demand elasticities. The analysis applies a linear probability which the authors found to be consistent with multinomial and binary logit models.

The authors find in China the incidence of risk rationing in farmers to be 6.5, 14 percent for quantity rationed and 80 percent for price rationed. In Mexico, 35 percent of the sample is risk rationed, 10 percent quantity rationed and 55 percent price rationed. The results from China support the hypothesis that the financially poor are more likely to be quantity rationed; in Mexico, however, the level of education is found to be important in determining quantity rationed. In both countries, asset wealthy farmers are less likely to be risk rationed; however, income does not appear to have an impact. The paper provides evidence that the elasticity of demand for credit is different among the three credit rationed groups: risk rationed, price rationed and quantity rationed. Risk aversion and prudence are significantly correlated with risk rationing in China, while only risk aversion is significant in Mexico. The results suggest that efforts to enhance credit access must also deal with risk and risk perceptions.

Risk rationing is an important concept in the understanding of rural credit markets. The findings that only 6.5 and 35 percent of Chinese and Mexican farmers are in stark contrast to each other. For agricultural economies such as Mexico with a significant number of farmers being risk rationing, more effort should be put into financial education and financial practices, including perhaps the use of risk-contingent credit to remove collateral risk. As property rights in China evolve, and new laws are promulgated to permit borrowing against land use rights, the collateralization issue will become much more important in rural credit markets.

This paper is the first to investigate risk rationing in China and Mexico and one of the few research studies empirically investigating risk rationing. A comparative analysis of Mexico and China is enlightening because of the structural differences in the respective agricultural economies. The use of a credit demand build and the enumeration of individual credit demand elasticities is an original contribution to this literature.

Japan has been suffering from a decline in the rate of young adults homeownership for a long time. The reduction of the homeownership rate for young adults suggests a delay of tenure transition from renting to owning a home. Such delays further imply that there is insufficient wealth accumulation and a low level of welfare. This paper examines these influences of the credit rationing and the credit rationing impact on the reduction in the young adults’ homeownership rate.

Credit rationing impacts the timing of house purchases and the value of the houses at the same time. This paper estimates these impacts jointly using a simultaneous equation system (minimum distance estimation) and the micro data on Japan.

This paper divides the effect of credit rationing on the timing into direct and indirect effects. The former is the rationing effect on timing, keeping the other variables constant, while the latter is the effect via changes in house values. This paper finds that the indirect effect reduces the rationing effect on the timing by decreasing house values. Furthermore, the results show that credit rationing delays home acquisition by prospective young owners (direct effect) and necessarily lowers the quality of houses they purchase.

In the previous papers, the endogeneity among the variables related to the housing purchase was not addressed. To separate the endogeneity of the timing from the house value, this paper applies the simultaneous equation model. Furthermore, this paper exhibits that there are direct and indirect effects of credit rationing on the timing of housing purchase made by young households. None of the previous papers recognize these two effects.

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the impact of zoning and pooling on brands, something not covered in depth in the historical literature. Also, the paper is intended to present research into how brands in the food, drink and confectionery industries during the Second World War used advertising in response to the government control of the market.

This paper is based on a close reading and interpretation of food, drink and confectionery brands advertisements from the Daily Express and Daily Mirror newspapers across the Second World War. Building on the work by Burridge (2008), it explores different message strategies used by brands in response to shortages, zoning and pooling.

While rationing has been discussed at length in the historical literature, zoning and pooling have not been. While brands provided information to their customers about rationing, shortages, zoning and pooling, the latter three also caused brands to apologise, look to the future and urge patience.

This study is based on the Daily Express and Daily Mirror from August 1939 to September 1945. Further research could explore other publications or the period after the war as control continued. Exploration of brand and agency archives could also provide more background into brands’ objectives and decision-making.

This is the first research to explore the impact of forms of control other than rationing on advertising during the Second World War.

The purpose of this paper is threefold. The paper aims to explore and present empirical evidence of microeconomical perspective of credit rationing phenomenon with special emphasis on the small and medium‐sized enterprise (SME) sector in the Republic of Croatia. In addition, the intention of this paper is to discuss SMEs' (ir)relevance in economic recovery and growth. Thus, macroeconomical implications of credit rationing problem are indirectly underlined.

Empirical analysis of credit rationing in the corporate bank loan market was carried out on a sample from the Croatian financial market which included data on approximately 4,300 small, medium‐sized and large companies in the period from the end of 2008 to the first quarter of 2010. Multiple linear regression model was developed in order to examine enterprise's size and borrowing costs nexus as well as borrowing costs' determinants. Descriptive statistics provided certain evidence on magnitude of credit rationing and pointed out different levels of interest rates after which credit rationing and credit discouraging appears for various sizes of enterprises.

In comparison to the large enterprises, SMEs continuously encounter higher borrowing costs, upon which this discrepancy enlarges in the aftermath and presence of financial crisis. Credit spread which is used as a proxy of borrowing costs is statistically significantly determined with enterprise's size, collateral and internal credit rating of a borrower, whereas enterprise's size evidenced the highest explanatory power. Descriptive statistics showed that market cleaning of the SMEs credit applications evolves on the level of higher interest rates.

The paper recommends thorough reexamination of economic importance of SMEs in Croatia and calls upon more efficient support strategy and fund allocation. Precisely, government actions should stimulate more inclusive bank finance of creditworthy SMEs.

This paper should induce and actualize better understanding of pitfalls, blunders and potentials of SMEs in fostering economic growth. More specifically, conclusions should be helpful to policy makers, national prudential authorities and students of economics.

Inclusion of borrowing costs in the analysis that presents a cut‐off point of demand and supply driven credit rationing could be a useful method for future empirical research on credit rationing.

Drought-related climate risk and access to credit are among the major risks to agricultural productivity for smallholder farmers in Kenya. Farmers are usually credit-constrained due to either involuntary quantity rationing or voluntary risk rationing. By exploiting randomized distribution of weather risk-contingent credit (RCC) and traditional credit, the authors estimate the causal effect of bundling weather index insurance to credit on uptake of agricultural credits among rural smallholders in Eastern Kenya. Further, the authors assess farmers' credit rationing, its determinants and effects on credit uptake.

The study design was a randomized controlled trial (RCT) conducted in Machakos County, Kenya. 1,170 sample households were randomly assigned to one of three research groups, namely control, RCC and traditional credit. This paper is based on baseline household survey data and the first phase of loan implementation data.

The authors find that 48% of the households were price-rationed, 41% were risk-rationed and 11% were quantity-rationed. The average credit uptake rate was 33% with the uptake of bundled credit being significantly higher than that of traditional credit. Risk rationing seems to influence the credit uptake negatively, whereas premium subsidies do not have any significant association with credit uptake. Among the socio-economic variables, training attendance, crop production being the main household head occupation, expenditure on food, maize labour requirement, hired labour, livestock revenue and access to credit are found to influence the credit uptake positively, whereas the expenditure on non-food items is negatively related with credit uptake.

The study findings provide important insights on the factors of credit demand. Empirical results suggest that risk rationing is pervasive and discourages farmers to take up credit. The study results also imply that credit demand is inelastic although relatively small sample size for RCC premium subsidy groups may be a limiting factor to the authors’ estimation.

By implementing a multi-arm RCT, the authors estimate the factors affecting the uptake of insurance bundled agricultural credits along with eliciting credit rationing among rural smallholders in Eastern Kenya. This paper provides key empirical findings on the uptake of RCC and the effect of credit rationing on uptake of agricultural credits, a field which has been majorly theoretical.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the determinants of agricultural credit rationing by formal lenders in Ghana.

This study employed descriptive statistics, analysis of variance (ANOVA) and Heckman's two-stage regression model to identify types of rationing faced by farmers and investigate factors that influence agricultural credit rationing by formal financial institutions. Data used in this study are gathered through a survey of 595 farmers in seven districts within Brong Ahafo Region of Ghana.

The result reveals that farmers face three types of rationing. Evidence from the Heckman two-stage models shows that engagement in off farm income generating activities, increase in farm size, positive balances on accounts and commercial orientation of the farmers has the potential to reduce rationing of credit applicants by formal lenders.

The results provide information on the factors that need to be considered as important in an attempt to reduce agricultural credit rationing by formal lenders.

The value of this study is that farmers would use the results of this study to improve access to required amount of agricultural credit from formal financial institutions. The information would also benefit stakeholders in the agricultural sector, particularly youth in agriculture program organized by Ministry of Food and Agriculture in Ghana as how to improve access to credit and reduce rationing of program participants by formal financial institutions.

Improving food security at the household level is very crucial in India as here many people are suffering from persistent hunger and malnutrition. In India, mounting pressure of population, adverse threats of climate change, fragmented land holding, high input cost etc. are very important which prevent to ensure food security. In India, there is malnutrition in all age groups, especially among children. Problem of low birth weight due to undernutrition of mother during pregnancy and underweight of children is very common in the country. The purchasing power of certain section of the society is so low that they cannot access food at the market price. They need the safety net of food subsidy. In India, food problem in the normative sense still continues to exist as millions of poor suffer from persistent hunger and malnutrition. This is the task to which food security system must address itself in future. There are some important factors which can increase yield growth and domestic supply of food substantially. Among these factors education and knowledge regarding improving farm efficiency, provision of an improved agricultural technology to the farmers, delivery of modern farm inputs, technical know-how, institutional credit to the farmers, and crop diversification are very essential to build a huge stock of food grains in India. Educated and trained people can acquire new skills and technologies required for growing agricultural output to meet the domestic demand.