The main objective of the paper was to examine the costs, returns and efficiency levels obtained by key players in the Ghanaian yam marketing chain. A total of 320 players/actors (farmers, wholesalers, retailers and cross-border traders) in the Ghanaian yam industry were selected from four districts (Techiman, Atebubu, Ejura-Sekyedumasi and Nkwanta) through a multi-stage sampling approach for t...

In contrast to other EU countries, Cyprus lacks comprehensive health care coverage for its population, thus a significant portion of the population lacks insurance for medicines. Due to the small size of the country and small indigenous pharmaceutical industry, pharmaceuticals are mainly imported. Prices in the private sector are determined based on the ex-factory price from the country of orig...

This paper studies the implications of a monetary policy shock on the skill premium and unemployment across skills. A dataset on the skill premium and the unemployment ratios of the high and low educated is compiled using the Outgoing Rotation Group of the Current Population Survey. A vector autoregressive analysis demonstrates that a contractionary policy induces a decline in the skill premium...

Smallholder farmers in developing countries like Ethiopia need to improve their position for agricultural products coffee order productivity and profitability through innovations within the chains. The study was conducted analyze value chain Sidama Zone of SNNPRS. Both primary secondary data were used. Descriptive statistics, mapping econometric methods employed data. Proportional stratified ra...

This paper presents congestion control mechanisms for reliable and scalable message-oriented middleware following the publish/ subscribe communication model. We identify the key requirements of congestion control in this environment, how it differs from congestion control for the Internet, and propose a combination of two congestion control mechanisms, (1) driven by a publisher hosting broker (...

BACKGROUND Explanations for the current worldwide financial crisis are primarily provided by economists and politicians. However, in the present work we focus on the psychological-cognitive factors that most likely affect the thinking of people on the economic stage and thus might also have had an effect on the progression of the crises. One of these factors might be the effect of prior beliefs...

Traditional publish/subscribe (pub/sub) systems may fail or cause longer message latency and higher computing resource usage in the presence of changes in the execution environment. We present the design and implementation of Mimosa Pudica, an adaptive and reliable middleware for adapting various changes in pub/sub systems. At the heart of Mimosa Pudica are two design ideas. First, the brokers ...

Brokered multi-agent systems can be incapacitated and rendered non-functional when the brokers become inaccessible due to failures that can occur in any distributed software system. We propose that the theory of teamwork can be used to specify robust brokered architectures that can recover from broker failures, and we present the Adaptive Agent Architecture (AAA) to show the feasibility of this...