Economic efficiency—understood in terms of jurisdictions providing a maximum amount of output for a given level of inputs—is one potential means to evaluate public policies. Various approaches, however, co-exist to measure the (technical) efficiency of organizations. Given that these rely on different underlying assumptions, it is important to assess whether, and to what extent, the approach ta...

In dieser Studie wird ein internationaler Effizienzvergleich der Stromverteilung in osteuropäischen Transformationsländern durchgeführt. Wir beziehen uns hierbei auf Polen, die Tschechische Republik, die Slowakei sowie Ungarn, und vergleichen die relative technische Effizienz der Regionalverteiler untereinander. Zum anderen wird die Effizienz mit denen der deutschen Regionalverteiler verglichen...

We present the two-loop QCD helicity amplitudes for quark-quark and quark-antiquark scattering. These amplitudes are relevant for next-to-next-to-leading order corrections to (polarized) jet production at hadron colliders. We give the results in the ‘t Hooft-Veltman and four-dimensional helicity (FDH) variants of dimensional regularization and present the scheme dependence of the results. We ve...

A decomposition of nominal value added growth over multiple sectors of an economy into explanatory factors is presented. The explanatory factors over a single sector are changes in the efficiency of the sector, growth of primary inputs, changes in sectoral output and input prices, technical progress and returns to scale. In order to implement the decomposition for a sector, an estimate of the s...

Since the Labour government came to power in 1997, it has introduced a regime whereby public services are accountable in respect of best value performance indicators (BVPIs). A recent Public Services Productivity Panel (PSP) (2000) report has developed a set of criteria whereby the economic analysis of police force efficiency by the Home Office is to be made standard. In this paper we utilise a...

Escherichia coli growing under anaerobic conditions produce H(2) and CO(2) by the enzymatic cleavage of formate that is produced from pyruvate at the end of glycolysis. Selenium is an integral part of formate dehydrogenase H (FDH H), which catalyses the first step in the formate hydrogen lyase (FHL) system. The genes of FHL system are transcribed only under anaerobic conditions, in the presence...

The Drosophila porcupine gene is required for secretion of wingless and other Wnt proteins, and sporadic mutations in its unique human ortholog, PORCN, cause a pleiotropic X-linked dominant disorder, focal dermal hypoplasia (FDH, also known as Goltz syndrome). We generated a conditional allele of the X-linked mouse Porcn gene and analyzed its requirement in Wnt signaling and embryonic developme...

Using DNA samples obtained from two unrelated patients, diagnosed as having familial dysalbuminaemic hyperthyroxinaemia (FDH), exons 1-14 which span the entire coding region of the human serum albumin (HSA) gene were amplified by the polymerase chain reaction. The sequence of each of the 14 DNA fragments was then determined. In each case a point mutation was identified at nucleotide 653 which c...

The gene for the NAD-dependent formate dehydrogenase (FDH) of Paracoccus sp. 12-A, a formate-assimilating bacterium, was cloned through screening of the genomic library with activity staining. The FDH gene included an open reading frame of 1,200 base pairs, and encoded a protein of 43,757 Da, which had high amino acid sequence identity with known FDHs, in particular, with bacterial enzymes such...

The effect of the addition of trimethylamine N-oxide (TMAO) in the growth medium on Escherichia coli anaerobic fermentative and respiratory pathways was examined. Formate dehydrogenase H (FDH-H) activity was totally repressed by the addition of 40 mM TMAO, whereas the overall hydrogenase (HYD) activity was reduced by 25%. Accordingly, expression of lacZ operon fusions with the fdhF and hycB str...