This article updates the private social welfare expenditures series with complete data for 1985 and information for most categories through 1986. In the United States, private sector expenditures play a substantial role in the provision of social welfare services. This article presents private social welfare expenditures in terms of the four major categories--health, education, welfare and rela...

IP based Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) are being deployed as the solution of choice for site-to-site communication for a large number of enterprises. The provider networks that support these services are faced with unique challenges in terms of network planning. There is a lot of value in understanding the characteristics of VPNs from the perspective of planning, provisioning and maintenance ...

In many low- and middle-income countries, a majority of people seek health care from the private sector. However, fragmentation, poor economies of scale, inadequate financing, political opposition, a bias toward curative services, and weak regulatory and quality control systems pose serious challenges for the private sector. Social franchising addresses a number of these challenges by organizin...

Wealth-related inequity in the use of maternal healthcare services continues to be a substantial problem in most low- and middle-income countries. One strategic approach to increase the use of appropriate maternal healthcare services is to encourage the expansion of the role of the private sector. However, critics of such an approach argue that increasing the role of the private sector will lea...

This paper examines the challenges and opportunities facing the agricultural biotechnology sector as it works to sustain innovations and further propagate its benefits into the new century. We survey the milestones of technological, legal, and economic precedence in this area and discuss institutional mechanisms for public and private partnership that can help agricultural biotechnology fulfill...

This paper reports a study regarding households’ willingness to pay for private sector solid waste management services. The data originated from a contingent valuation survey conducted in 224 households in Ilorin in southwest Nigeria and was analysed using tobit and censored least absolute deviations models. The use of a robust and consistent estimator to model zero willingness to pay responses...