background abortions are of major public health concern in developing countries. in settings in which abortion is highly prohibited, the direct interview is not a reliable method to estimate the abortion rate. the indirect estimation methods to measure the rate of abortion might overcome this dilemma; they are practical methods to estimate the size of the hidden group who do not agree to partic...

the objective of this paper is to determine the efficiency of manufacturing companies in kenya over the period of 2009 to 2011 as well as suggesting appropriate policies to be employed by the manufacturing companies in kenya based on the findings of the study. three critical inputs variables (raw materials, staff expenses and plant and machinery) and two output variables (net sale and earnings ...

network scale-up is an indirect method for estimating the size of hidden, hard-to-count or high risk populations. social network size estimation is the first step in this method. the present study was conducted with the purpose of estimating the social network size of the tehran province residents and its determinants.maximum likelihood estimation was applied to estimate people's network sizes ...

An economic measure of scale efficiency is the ratio of the minimum average cost to the average cost at the actual output level of a firm. It is easily measured by the ratio of the total cost of this output under the constant and variable returns to scale assumptions. This procedure does not identify the output level where the average cost reaches a minimum. This paper proposes a nonparametric ...

industrial revolution, colonialism and spreading of patterns of development and consequently the vast rural and urban migrations and centralism in recent century caused the creation of unbalanced population distribution pattern in iran. in addition to areas in which inequalities of environmental and productive resources increase space disparity of distribution of populations, in arease like aze...

BACKGROUND National Health Systems managers have been subject in recent years to considerable pressure to increase concentration and allow mergers. This pressure has been justified by a belief that larger hospitals lead to lower average costs and better clinical outcomes through the exploitation of economies of scale. In this context, the opportunity to measure scale efficiency is crucial to ad...

One explanation for animal personality is that different behavioural types derive from different life-history strategies. Highly productive individuals, with high growth rates and high fecundity, are assumed to live life at a fast pace showing high levels of boldness and risk taking, compared with less productive individuals. Here, we investigate among-individual differences in mean boldness (t...

abstract the production unit size is one of the effective factors in optimum uses of inputs. since optimum size is affected by the characters and economical conditions in each district, the studies for determining the optimum farm size should be done specially for each crop and each district. in this study tried to determine the optimum rice farm size in guilan province which is one of the most...