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The purpose of this paper is to seek to elicit, in a context of economic crisis, the social preferences for the microallocation of scarce healthcare resources.

Data were collected from an online questionnaire which includes a hypothetical rationing choice scenario with four patients differentiated by their personal characteristics and health states competing for treatments and a set of statements that embodies: distributive criteria for prioritizing patients; the authorship of these types of decisions; and the likelihood of these decisions to be taken. Descriptive statistics, factor analysis and non-parametric test were used for describing and validating the data.

Findings suggest that respondents: support a pluralism of distributive principles in prioritizing patients with an incident in utilitarianism and the reducing of inequalities in health, translated in the fair-inning and in emotional arguments of fragility; trust in the health professional to make prioritization decisions; and are conscious that rationing decisions will be real in the short term.

The pursuit of efficiency and the equalizing of a lifetime health seem to be the criteria that should guide any rationing policy at the micro level.

This study addresses simultaneously several ethical principles inherent to microallocation healthcare resources in a suitable context in which Portugal is facing an economic crisis and where, consequently, rationing healthcare policies gain prominence on the political agenda.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether negative incentives in the pay-for-performance mechanism would trigger loan officers to strategically reject potentially good loans. If so, what is the feasible solution to alleviate the problem.

A framed field experiment was conducted to test loan decision behaviors using loan officers from Rural Credit Cooperatives in Shandong, China. A 2 by 2 between-subject design was adopted to generate variation in incentives and prior information about credit risks.

Results showed that loan officers did ration credit by rejecting more loans when facing risks of personal income loss. However, providing risk information about the application pool boosted the approval rate and offset the behavioral responses by a roughly same magnitude.

Findings in this study suggest that certain institutional settings can result in credit rationing via strategic loan misclassification. Further, information sometimes generates similar effects as those costly incentives or mechanisms that are not implementable in practice.

This study adopted an innovative monetized experimental design that allows researchers to examine the (otherwise unobservable) trade-offs between Type I and Type II error in loan misclassification as incentives change. In addition, an anchoring prior information treatment is used to solicit the relative power of almost costless information and costly monetary incentives, and to point out a potentially feasible solution.

14. Peppermint extract is the flavouring extract prepared from oil of peppermint, or from peppermint, or both, and contains not less than 3 per cent. by volume by oil of peppermint.

The global Covid-19 pandemic is posing considerable challenges for governments throughout the world and has and will have a significant influence on the shape of peoples social and economic life and wellbeing in the short and longer term. This opinion paper discusses the current health policy response adopted in England to control or manage the epidemic and identifies the key sociological and political influences which have shaped these policies. Drawing on the theoretical approach set out in his recent book, which emphasises the interplay of powerful structural and economic interest groups, the author will consider the influence of the key players. Government policy has tied itself to scientific and medical evidence and protecting the NHS so the key roles of the medical profession, public health scientific community and NHS management and their respective and relative powerful influences will be discussed. The government needs the support of the public if their policies are to be successful, so how have the government addressed maintaining public trust in this “crisis” and how much trust do the public have in the government and what has influenced it? The strong emphasis on social distancing and social isolation in the national government policy response to Covid-19 has placed an increasing public reliance on the traditional and social media for sources of information so how the media has framed the policy will be considered. One policy aim is for an effective vaccine and the influence of the drug industry in its development is discussed. Finally, the role of the state will be discussed and what has shaped its social and economic policies.

The purpose of this paper is to test major web search engines on their performance on navigational queries, i.e. searches for homepages.

In total, 100 user queries are posed to six search engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Ask, Seekport, and Exalead). Users described the desired pages, and the results position of these was recorded. Measured success and mean reciprocal rank are calculated.

The performance of the major search engines Google, Yahoo!, and MSN was found to be the best, with around 90 per cent of queries answered correctly. Ask and Exalead performed worse but received good scores as well.

All queries were in German, and the German‐language interfaces of the search engines were used. Therefore, the results are only valid for German queries.

When designing a search engine to compete with the major search engines, care should be taken on the performance on navigational queries. Users can be influenced easily in their quality ratings of search engines based on this performance.

This study systematically compares the major search engines on navigational queries and compares the findings with studies on the retrieval effectiveness of the engines on informational queries.

Cassava production surged noticeably in Southeastern Africa beginning in the 1990s. The purpose of this paper is to examine the commercial responses and food security consequences of cassava production growth in the region.

The paper incorporates a mix of quantitative analysis, based primarily on original analysis of national farm household survey data, together with key informant interviews with value chain participants in the three neighboring countries of Malawi, Mozambique and Zambia.

In the cassava production zones, cassava's high productivity translates into per kilogram carbohydrate costs 60 per cent to 70 per cent of the cost of cereals such as maize and wheat, thereby opening up a range of profitable opportunities for commercialization of cassava‐based foods, feeds and industrial products. Despite this potential, cassava commercialization in Southeastern Africa remains in its formative stages, with only 10 per cent to 30 per cent of production currently marketed. Unlike West Africa, where cassava commercialization has centered on marketing prepared cassava‐based convenience foods, the emerging cassava markets in Southeastern Africa have centered on fresh cassava, low value‐added cassava flour, and experiments in industrial processing of cassava‐based starches, biofuels and feeds. Strategic investment in a set of key public goods (breeding, training in food sciences and food safety, and research on in‐ground cassava storage) can help to shape this transition in ways that benefit both commercial interests and the food security of vulnerable households.

The paper compares cassava commercialization across differing agro‐climatic zones, policy environments and food staple zones.

This paper attempts to explore possible contributing factors of females' outperformance and males' underperformance in the higher education in Pakistan from teachers' perspective. The central question of the study is what are the key factors that affect female and male students' educational performance at the university level? Using Artificial Neural Network (ANN) as a framework, we attempted to predict differentials of the perceived “female outperformance” and “male underperformance” in higher education. We carried out the study by employing quantitative research methods.

The data for the study come from 253 teachers from University of the Punjab-largest and oldest University in Pakistan. We used a structured questionnaire for data collection. The analysis was carried out with the help of ANN model. Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) was used to analyze the data.

The testing results of ANN indicated 85.3% of teachers' perception was correctly predicted on various dimensions of performance differentials across female and male students in higher education.

The study banks on primary data collected from teachers of the University of University of the Punjab, Pakistan. Thus, the study's universe was limited to one university – University of Punjab. It is purely based on a quantitative approach employing ANN.

The findings of this study have several significant implications, i.e. it makes a significant contribution to the existing body of scholarly texts on the issue of gender reverse change in academic performance in higher education.

The findings of this research, derived from primary data in Pakistan context, qualify this research as an original one. We also claim that this study is one of the first studies on gender reverse change in academic performance among graduate students in a public sector university of Pakistan employing ANN.

In the presence of credit rationing the poor are unable to exploit growth‐promoting opportunities. Using data gathered from a household survey on North China Plain, the purpose of this paper is to find pervasive rationing in the highly regulated formal credit market in rural China. The subsidized credit policies favor local elites instead of the targeted poor strata and earmarked credit programs are less effective. By jointly estimating credit rationing in both the formal and informal sectors, this paper elaborates on the fragmented rural credit market in China where different borrower segments are systematically sorted out across different loan types. Non‐targeted credit programs cannot address income redistribution or sustainable poverty reduction in the presence of such skewed equality and equity.

The basis of this study is a multi‐topic household survey data on rural households in the North China Plain, with 337 rural households being randomly sampled out of five purposely selected counties. The particular objectives are to identify the determinants of credit rationing in both formal and informal sectors, to show the extent of credit rationing by using Probit model, to explore the substitutability of institutional and informal lending by using bivariate probit specification.

First, there exists pervasive rationing in the highly regulated formal credit market in rural China. Second, the subsidized credit policies favor local elites, instead of the targeted poor strata; and the earmarked credit programs are less effective. Third, informal credits, in a form of reciprocal arrangement, are weak substitutes for institutional loans. Different segments of borrowers are systematically sorted out across different loan types; the rural credit market is fragmented. Fourth, government‐led credit programs are not effective in promoting agricultural investments; credits of rural non‐farm activities facilitate agricultural transformation.

Since 2004, the policymakers in China initiated a set of policies towards promoting agricultural and rural development to spur the rural economy and ease tensions in rural area. Credit policies, believed often to be efficient and guided tools to provide financing to investors, gained a great deal of appeal. Given the widely existing failure of government‐driven rural credit programs in many other developing countries, how the interventions affect the rural economy in China should be investigated. However, little has been done to explore the interventions on smallholder farmers and the existing evidence is therefore pieced and anecdotal. This paper aims to fill that gap.

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.

In order to improve the assessment of current lending policies for a microfinance institution (MFI) in Azerbaijan, the purpose of this paper is to analyse how lending conditions are adjusted based on knowledge gains during the loan relationship, with particular attention to delays in previous loans. Moreover, the paper examines what a lender can pre-determine from its own collected repayment records of clients. In addition, the repayment performances and lending policies between agricultural and non-agricultural clients are differentiated.

The analyses are based on a rich data set of an Azerbaijani MFI. For determining the influence of previous delays on the volume rationing in the following loan, the authors apply a generalized linear model. Subsequently, the probability of recidivism is analysed by means of a logit model.

The results confirm a positive relationship between delays in previous loans and repayment problems in present loans, which is increased by the severity of the previous delay. With respect to consequences, it is shown that the borrower with previous delays faces an increase in loan volume rationing in the subsequent loan. Moreover, the authors find that the consequences of previous delays do not differ significantly between farmers and other clients.

Until now, the consequences of repayment delinquencies in microfinance lending relationships have hardly been investigated. This study enhances the understanding of lending policies in microfinance by focussing on relationship aspects and by simultaneously differentiating between farming and non-farming clients.