Suppose imitation becomes easier in developing countries due to international technology diffusion or other reasons. If imitation also occurs in the North, Northern imitators (as well as innovators) would become less secure from low-cost Southern imitations. Does the resulting rise in Southern imitation lead to a decrease in Northern imitation (and perhaps even innovation)? If so, does the over...

this paper using generalized roeger's model calculated the lerner index for iranian active industries in 4-digit isic codes during the period 1995-2007. the findings indicate that the lerner index has been between 8 to 16 percent in 38 industries among 131 ones. the index also in different industries shows that more than 50 percent of iranian industries have monopolistic power such that th...

during recent years, a debate has been taking place on the relationship between economic growth and trade policies. the present article explores the impact of trade liberalization on economic growth in islamic countries. we chose a sample of 26 islamic countries and using the gmm method, estimated the correlation between trade liberalization and economic growth for the period 1990-2003. the emp...

sharp increase in oil price and the volatility in recent decades have attracted most researchers towards the field of energy. it seems not only the direct oil price, but also the uncertainty caused by the oil price volatility affect the raw oil supply. in this research the effect of oil price volatility on oil supply has been estimated using monthly time series data from january 1980 to septemb...

â â â â â  farzaneh mohammadi [1] â  phd candidate in health economics, tarbiat moderes university, iran â  mostafa emadzadeh â  professor of economics, university of isfahan, iran â  azarnoush ansari â  phd candidate in business, university of isfahan, iran â â â  abstract â  sustainable development is a controversial concept which has been considered over the three decades. it is comprehensiv...

This work explores the effect of text representation techniques on the overall performance of medical text classification. To accomplish this goal, we developed a text classification system that supports the very basic word representation (bag-of-words) and the more complex medical phrase representation (bag-of-phrases). We also combined word and phrase representations (hybrid) for further anal...

Increasingly, mental health services in resource-limited settings are being delivered by lay health workers with limited professional training. This study compared beliefs and attitudes about mental illness among church-based lay health workers in Enugu, Nigeria with no psychiatric training (n=59) and medical trainees with different levels of exposure to psychiatric care from two teaching hospi...

This paper introduces a test for the comparison of multiple misspecifed conditional interval models, for the case of dependent observations. Model accuracy is measured using a distributional analog of mean square error, in which the squared (approximation) error associated with a given model, say model i, for the interval [u, u] is measured by E (( (F1(u|Z, θ† 1)− F1(u|Z, θ† 1))− (F0(u|Z, θ0)− ...

The key question answered in this paper is, what characterises the manufacturing business environment in Nigeria and how are firms and government supposed to react? Based on a sample of manufacturing firms, our findings show that the environment, though complex-changing, is analysable. We offer some explanations for and draw strategic implications from these results. In a large, protected low-i...

This study applies a production function approach to value the groundwater recharge function of the Hadejia-Nguru wetlands in northern Nigeria. The groundwater recharge function supports dry season agricultural production which is dependent on groundwater abstraction for irrigation. Using survey data this paper first carries out an economic valuation of agricultural production, per hectare of i...