The diversified business group (DBG) is a ubiquitous institution in developing economies. It is a formal inter-firm network that typically involves financial institutions, distributors and manufacturers. Groupwise diversification is viewed by some as a novel form of organisational innovation by entrepreneurial tycoons while others see it as an instrument for rent seeking. Inspired by Korean cha...

Economic transition is associated with significant shifts in relative prices between private and public goods. If, as a result, public goods claim a larger share of total expenditures, economies of scale in consumption increase. We show how relative price changes might alter the welfare of different-sized households in the short run and over time. We illustrate, for a selection of transition ec...

This paper looks at the importance of scale economies – defined in terms of the benefits from innovation – from both a theoretical and an empirical perspective. We argue that one can only gauge the degree of scale economies at the industry level by taking account of the degree of specialization – hence the reliance on international trade – as well as the size of an economy. We show that in Icel...

Local health departments (LHDs) across the United States deliver a range of essential public health services, yet little is known about the costs that LHDs incur in providing these services and the factors that may cause costs to vary both within and across health departments. This report first describes the variations in the costs of one core public health activity commonly provided by LHDs: f...

Social-economic factors are considered as the key to understand processes contributing to biological invasions. However, there has been few quantified, statistical evidence on the relationship between economic development and biological invasion on a worldwide scale. Herein, using principal factor analysis, we investigated the relationship between biological invasion and economic development to...

BACKGROUND Global resource needs estimation is a critical part of addressing the HIV/AIDS epidemic. To generate these estimates knowledge of costs and cost structures is required. The evidence base for costs of HIV prevention programmes is limited. Even less is known about the existence of economies scale and whether, as economic theory suggests, average costs form a 'u'-shaped curve as scale i...

in recent years, the studies of location play a key role in success and stability of economic activities. location studies are under consideration in both national and international levels. meanwhile, identification of goals and methods of solving location problems have significant importance. the purpose of this paper is to examine spatial distribution of economic activities in 14 zones of esf...

While many firms have used advancements in information and communication technology to optimize their supply chain and primary processes, there is still a substantial efficiency potential associated with financial processes. A main hypothesis is that an industrialization of the financial chain by standardizing as well as internal and external systems integration can offer great efficiency poten...

Background: Global resource needs estimation is a critical part of addressing the HIV/AIDS epidemic. To generate these estimates knowledge of costs and cost structures is required. The evidence base for costs of HIV prevention programmes is limited. Even less is known about the existence of economies scale and whether, as economic theory suggests, average costs form a 'u'shaped curve as scale i...

This paper deals with the problem of incentive mechanism design in non-convex production economies when production sets and preferences both are unknown to the designer. We consider Nash-implementation of loss-free, average cost, marginal cost, voluntary trading, and quantity-taking pricing equilibrium allocations in economies involving increasing returns to scale or more general types of non-c...