modelling the transport sector fuel demand for developng economies abstract this paper concentrates on the transport sector of six developing countries with similar common denominators namely turkey thailand pakistan morocco tunisia and malaysia by using standard econometric techniques we analyse the evolution of oil demand for road transport in these countries in relation to independent variables such as income population price of gasoline and diesel etc unlike the treatment in the present literature on the subject gasoline and diesel consumption are estimated separately due to the high share of diesel in the total transport sector consumption on the basis of the estimation over the period 1970 1990 on a country by country basis we forecast the demand for these six countries until 2010 the results of this study indicate that the transport sector will be the driving force for energy and oil demand as part of economic growth in these developing countries its share in the future energy market structure is expected to grow consequently the pricing policies of oil products in this sector have a crucial role for shaping rational economic and energy strategies within the framework of rising environmental concern

multiproduct short run hospital cost functions empirical evidence and policy implications from cross section data economists and policymakers have been interested in hospital costs and the structure of hospital technologies for several decades now early interest was focused on the possibility of scale economies which implied increased efficiency for larger hospitals 6 8 12 13 18 20 while more recent interest has been stimulated by the inflationary spiral of hospital costs 1 15 17 22 as hospital costs have risen important policy questions concerning the impact on costs of the hospitals diagnostic case mix the hospitals admitting physicians the hospitals size and the hospitals efficiency have emerged and researchers have attempted to deal with these issues within the context of increasingly complex econometric models 1 2 5 24 27 however in attempting to analyze these important policy issues researchers have been forced to make two major types of compromises on the one hand appropriate data are often not available for estimating a well specified cost function e g information on admitting physicians and diagnostic case mix are often missing so that problems of specification error often plague the econometric results conversely in using imaginative ways to deal with data problems e g weighting in patient and out patient care to form a single index of hospital services 1 27 or estimating separate cost functions for each department in the hospital 2 researchers sometimes place unrealistic and unnecessary constraints on their econometric models the purpose of this study is to analyze the impact of several of the primary hospital characteristics mentioned above on the short run costs of hospitals within a theoretically consistent framework in the following discussion we also develop the theoretical

determinants of import demand for non renewable energy petroleum products empirical evidence from nigeria abstract this study estimated determinants of import demand for refined petroleum products in nigeria for the period 1984 2013 it employed the autoregressive distributed lag ardl bounds test cointegration method and analysed both long run and short run determinants of import demand for total and specific petroleum products in the long run aggregate and sectoral incomes are significant determinants of import of refined kerosene further real effective exchange rate reer aggregate income gdp manufacturing sector s income domestic energy production dep and population growth rate pgr are drivers of import of refined motor spirit moreover reer dep and manufacturing sector s income are propellers of import of refined distillate fuel also reer and total output of petroleum products are major drivers of total import of refined petroleum products short run results show that previous period gdp pgr and manufacturing and service sectors incomes are determinants of import demand for refined kerosene moreover reer gdp previous pgr and manufacturing sector s income exert significant effects on the import of refined motor spirit further significant effects of reer dep previous pgr domestic output of the product and manufacturing and service sectors incomes on the import demand for distillate fuel were found policy implications of the foregoing are articulated in the paper

life and work of john richard nicholas stone 1913 1991 sir richard stone knighted in 1978 and nobel laureate in economics in 1984 was one of the pioneering architects of national income and social accounts and one of the few economists of his generation to have faced the challenge of economics as a science by combining theory and measurement within a cohesive framework he was awarded the nobel prize in economics for his fundamental contributions to the development of national accounts but made equally significant contributions to the empirical analysis of consumer behaviour his work on the growth project was also instrumental in the development of appropriate econometric methodology for the construction and the analysis of large disaggregated macroeconometric models this paper provides an analysis of stone s many contributions

a stochastic production function for machine repair although work by levhari and sheshinski 1970 and syrquin 1972 suggests that general functional forms such as the cobb douglas and ces accurately approximate a machine repair stochastic production process this paper shows that these authors have not adequately captured the stochastic nature of the production process more importantly while general forms are convenient and widely employed this paper argues that there is a more direct method for determining the properties of the production process

applied general equilibrium models of taxation and international trade an introduction and survey we wish to acknowledge the help of three referees and of john pencavel on several earlier drafts as well as the assistance of the modelers whose work is referred to in the paper they corrected our lack of understanding of their work and provided many other helpful comments excellent research and bibliographical assistance have been provided by debbie fretz radwan shaban and janet stotsky helpful comments have been made by charles ballard michael boskin lans bovenberg sylvester damus harvey galper glenn harrison gordon lenjosek jack mutti serena ng t n srinivasan charles stuart and eric toder the authors also acknowledgefinancial support from the national bureau of economic research the national science foundation international business machines and the social sciences and humanities research council ottawa canada

the demand for gasoline abstract sufficient time must be allowed to elapse to assess fully the response of gasoline demand to price changes hitherto empirical work on the subject has generally not examined the period beyond 1975 moreover the extant time series studies concentrate almost exclusively on the usa this study extends both the observation period and the country coverage a vehicle stock adjustment model is estimated via its reduced form without explicit consideration of the vehicle stock itself however the estimation procedure incorporates the structure by way of constraints on the parameters cross section analysis offers additional evidence concerning the truly long run price elasticity the results suggest that there is no need to resort to elaborate models to explain adequately gasoline demand gasoline demand exhibits a long run price elasticity near unity with time lags exceeding six years while there is tentative evidence that the duration of these lags is not fixed

what drives energy consumption in developing countries the experience of selected african countries abstract this study investigates the drivers of energy consumption in sub saharan african countries it applies the bounds testing approach to cointegration to time series data at individual country levels over the period from 1970 to 2011 the study finds that energy consumption is cointegrated with real gdp per capita industrial output imports foreign direct investment credit to private sector urbanization and population furthermore the sign and magnitude of long run estimates vary significantly for a single country and across countries depending on the energy consumption variable used overall the findings confirm the leading role of economic growth industrial output population and urbanization economic growth industrial output and population have positive effects on energy consumption in the majority of countries given the urgent need to address climate change african countries should adopt policies to improve energy efficiency and accelerate transition toward renewable energy the african renewable energy initiative launched at the 21st session of the united nations conference of the parties cop21 is an opportunity for african countries to provide and maintain widespread access to reliable and affordable environmentally cleaner energy to meet the requirements of rapid economic growth and improved living standards

hospital technology in a nonmarket health care system 1 introduction the theoretical framework relating to the production of health services by hospitals is similar to that of any other firm economists are concerned with much the same issues in the measurement of output in the health sector as in other spheres of production foremost among these is the shape of the production function that underlies the transformation of inputs into outputs since it determines the optimal size and structure of the production unit in this case hospitals based on a 12 year panel of all short term hospitals in quebec covering 1981 through 1992 this research examines the health care production process the approach is new in that it examines hospitals in a noncompetitive socialized framework and relies on a very complete hospital sector data set to avoid biases often present in previous work all quasi fixed inputs physicians equipment and buildings all variable inputs labor drugs food for inpatients supplies energy and an aggregate of other inputs and all outputs inpatient care outpatient care food and laundry services sold to the public laboratory services to outpatients or under contract and teaching are included in the estimation determining the optimality of the hospital industry structure in quebec is important for at least two reasons first hospital investment decisions in quebec are centralized planners can determine the optimal hospital structure only if they have knowledge of the hospital production process second the absence of a competitive market precludes the usual adjustments driven by competitive pressures from taking place diseconomies of scope or scale highly unlikely in a competitive market might be present large and persistent in a nonmarket structure in quebec hospitals are most often private not for profit institutions however the quebec government that controls the national health insurance system is their only payer except for very small revenues from hospital private foundations or uninsured services such as cosmetic surgery some laboratory tests etc these private payments to hospitals represent negligible amounts as a result the system operates very much as if hospitals were in fact public entities collective bargaining occurs with the government reimbursement rates are determined by the government and major investment or merger decisions equipment purchase or new construction are approved by the government the present analysis provides a framework to gather information valuable to planners in any publicly funded system as they restructure hospital health services delivery in quebec the government could also better respond to changes in relative input prices through changes in relative input use review of its reliance on private laboratory analysis services or toughening of its medical school admissions policies in the early 1990s and without the benefit of an analysis such as this one the quebec government froze health care spending closed a number of hospitals changed hospitals role from short term care to long term care and decentralized its structure through regional boards regies regionales some of the unintended consequences included crowding in hospitals a near breakdown of emergency care during the first months of each year since and few if any gains in efficiency our analysis provides an exploration of the structure of hospital production in a nonmarket environment in anticipation of unavoidable restructuring of the industry in the years to come it also suggests a management tool for planners to direct the industry toward greater economic performance through changes in hospitals relative budgets changes in the scope of services offered or mergers between establishments this article examines the optimality of size diversification capitalization levels and technological change as well as the flexibility in the choice of inputs and outputs it identifies the hospital and delivery structure characteristics associated with greater performance

demand for gasoline in kuwait an empirical analysis using cointegration techniques abstract this paper estimates the demand for gasoline in kuwait for the period 1970 1989 using a cointegration and error correction model ecm it is found that gasoline demand is inelastic with respect to price in the short and long run and while it is elastic in the long run gasoline demand is inelastic with respect to income in the short run this suggests that gasoline demand response to income changes is higher in the long run than in the short run furthermore gasoline consumption adjusts towards its long run level with about 52 of the adjustment occurring in the first year

world transport energy demand modelling methodology and elasticities abstract this paper presents the international energy agency s iea approach of modelling transport energy demand fuel demand which is not a demand per se is derived whenever possible from the economic activity in the transport sector and not estimated directly ie using one equation or simultaneous equation system in general the transport models employ a two step approach in the first step transport activity the sector s relevant energy service is estimated econometrically in the second step the transport activity projections are then combined with estimates of efficiency improvements car turnover rates and diesel gasoline penetration assumptions in order to arrive at projections of fuel demand the principal advantages of this approach are that the relevant energy services are modelled and that for model simulation efficiency improvements can be dealt with explicitly the effectiveness of economic instruments is a function of the reaction of consumers and businesses to income and price changes an in depth understanding of income and price elasticities of transport demand and transport energy demand is important in order to be able to assess the effectiveness of policies considered the paper also shows the underlying long term income and price elasticities for oecd and non oecd regions

an empirical analysis of energy demand in namibia abstract using a unique database of end user local energy data and the recently developed autoregressive distributed lag ardl bounds testing approach to cointegration we estimate the long run elasticities of the namibian energy demand function at both aggregated level and by type of energy electricity petrol and diesel for the period 1980 2002 our main results show that energy consumption responds positively to changes in gdp and negatively to changes in energy price and air temperature the differences in price elasticities across fuels uncovered by this study have significant implications for energy taxation by namibian policy makers we do not find any significant cross price elasticities between different fuel types

demand for gasoline in the gcc an application of pooling and testing procedures the structure of gasoline demand in the gcc countries was analysed the aim was to estimate price and income elasticities both for the short and long run it was found that gasoline demand is inelastic with respect to both price and income for both the short and long run when gcc countries were divided into two groups based on their pricing policies it was found that the group with the free market approach and higher reliance on market forces gave larger price elasticities and smaller income elasticities in both the short run and long run

exploring hospital production relationships with flexible functional forms this paper estimates a multiproduct variable cost function using data on a sample of california hospitals the results provide useful insights into the advantages and disadvantages of flexible functional forms for cost analysis the translog function appears to provide reasonable estimates of marginal costs when evaluated at or near the approximation point of the function the estimated function performs less satisfactorily however when evaluated outside this range the paper s results do not provide strong evidence of either ray scale economies or of weak cost complementarities there is some evidence however that the degree of scale economies may be underestimated

cross country comparisons of technical efficiency of health production a demonstration of pitfalls it has been proposed that cross country comparisons of the technical efficiency of health production estimated using data envelopment analysis dea have useful applications for policy makers in theory such an analysis utilizes measures of the socioeconomic determinants of health relevant to all social policy not just health policy using oecd and who data this article critically analyses a number of outstanding theoretical questions regarding the use of dea in this setting it concludes that until such questions are addressed the resultant implications for policy will be based on misleading information

an empirical analysis of gasoline demand in denmark using cointegration techniques abstract danish time series data covering the period 1948 1991 are used in order to estimate short run and long run elasticities in gasoline demand a cointegration test for a stable long run relationship between the variables in the model proves to be positive showing a smaller value of the long run price elasticity than often quoted in empirical studies of gasoline demand finally an error correction model is estimated

long run gasoline demand for passenger cars the role of income distribution it is commonly agreed that the level of income and prices are crucial determinants of the consumption of motor gasoline the respective long run price and income elasticities are regularly calculated using cross sectional models despite the acknowledgement of the role of income distribution it plays no role in intercountry cross sectional models this is due to a lack of appropriate data this paper shows that the omission of distributional characteristics provides misleading elasticities using available distributional measures this paper is referring to an income threshold which is crucial to the acquisition of an automobile it is shown that on the one hand in poor countries an unequal income distribution is needed to enable at least some people to buy automobiles on the other hand in wealthy countries an unequal income distribution would exclude some people from acquiring automobiles hence depending on the income level inequality has a diverging impact on the ability to buy durable goods the second part of this paper develops a pooled 90 country model to examine this approach empirically it could be shown that distribution variables are highly significant to explain the demand for automobiles and motor gasoline moreover the consideration of the distribution of income leads to a considerable decrease in income elasticity values this is mainly due to the positive correlation between income level and income equality within the sample

empirical assessment of the determinants of road energy demand in greece this paper attempts to cast light on the determinants of road energy demand in greece for this purpose we used cointegration techniques and vector autoregression var analysis in order to capture short run and long run dynamics for gasoline and diesel demand respectively from the empirical analysis that covers the period 1978 2003 we find that in the long run gasoline energy demand appears to be price and income inelastic while diesel demand appears to be price inelastic and income elastic we also found that the absence of close substitutes in the road sector denotes the low level of energy switching in greece

better outcomes at lower costs the effect of public health expenditures on hospital efficiency abstractlocal health departments play a critical role in the community they serve as they are the foundation of the u s public health system providing services such as immunizations to the less af

elasticities science or fiction abstract apart from discrepancies in statistical data series the most frequent source of inconsistencies among elasticity estimates is the model specification and the interpretation of empirical results this paper investigates this issue and in particular highlights the misconception that elasticities can scientifically and uniquely be determined by econometric techniques however it is common knowledge that econometric methods constitute a very good tool for analysing the past thus the main message of this exercise is that in the absence of complete specification there are important trends in the elasticities themselves such trends are very crucial and need to be interpreted if elasticities are to be used for forecasting purposes

hospital costs and excess bed capacity a statistical analysis this paper develops and estimates a cost model for u s hospitals analyzing the cost of excess bed capacity a new estimate is worth making for at least two reasons recent changes in the economic environment of hospitals have caused their utilization rates to fall sharply making previous estimates inaccurate second we employ econometric techniques not previously applied to this problem with estimation based on all short term community hospitals from 1979 89 our results based on conservative estimates of the average optimal occupancy rate indicate an annual cost of excess bed capacity of 17 2 billion in 1989 24 1 billion in 1991 and over 25 billion in 1993 copyright 1996 by mit press

the stochastic determinants of hospital bed supply this paper uses a general queuing theoretic model to derive more appropriate measures of hospital quality such as turn away probabilities and patient s expected waiting time than have been used in recent empirical work e g joskow 1980

the demand for gasoline in south africa an empirical analysis using co integration techniques abstract using the recently developed autoregressive distributed lag ardl bound testing approach to co integration suggested by pesaran et al pesaran m h shin y smith r j bounds testing approaches to the analysis of level relationships journal of applied econometrics 2001 16 3 289 326 we empirically analyzed the long run relationship among the variables in the aggregate gasoline demand function over the period 1978 2005 our study confirms the existence of a co integrating relationship the estimated price and income elasticities of 0 47 and 0 36 imply that gasoline demand in south africa is price and income inelastic

household adjustment to gasoline price change an analysis using 9 years of us survey data this paper examines the dynamics and composition of household adjustment to changes in the real price of gasoline using a panel of us households by decomposing the demand for gasoline into the demand for vehicle miles traveled and the demand for household composite miles per gallon we are able to add rich detail to the description of how households respond to gasoline price changes while obtaining total price elasticity estimates well within the range found in the literature we find that consumers initially respond to a price rise with a much larger decrease in consumption than would be indicated by the total elasticity in addition households respond to price changes by adjusting vehicle miles traveled more than composite miles per gallon in the year after a price change

short and long run elasticities of gasoline demand in india an empirical analysis using cointegration techniques abstract in developing countries like india consumption of petroleum products has implications on its balance of payments economic growth and fiscal deficit gasoline is one of the prime petroleum products in this paper the relationship between gasoline demand national income and price of gasoline is empirically examined using cointegration and error correction techniques the time frame of the analysis is from 1972 1973 to 1993 1994 it has been found that gasoline demand is likely to increase significantly for a given increase in the gross domestic product the increase will be larger in the long run 2 682 than in the short run 1 178 gasoline demand is relatively inelastic to price changes both in the long and short terms the error correction model has shown that gasoline demand adjusts to their respective long run equilibrium at a relatively slow rate with about 28 of adjustment taking place in the first year

public insurance and child hospitalizations access and efficiency effects abstract the 1983 1996 period saw enormous expansions in access to public health insurance for low income children we explore the impact of these expansions on child hospitalizations while greater access to inpatient care may increase hospital utilization improved efficiency of care for children who are also newly eligible for primary care could lower hospitalization rates we use a large sample of child discharges from the national hospital discharge survey nhds to assess the net impact of medicaid expansions on hospitalizations during this period we find that total hospitalizations increased significantly with each 10 percentage point rise in eligibility leading to an 8 4 increase in hospitalizations thus the access effect strongly outweighs any efficiency effect produced by expanded coverage however we find some support for an efficiency effect the increase in hospitalizations for unavoidable conditions is much larger than that for avoidable conditions that are most sensitive to outpatient care indeed the increase in avoidable hospitalizations is less than half that of unavoidable hospitalizations and it is not statistically significant we also find that expanded medicaid eligibility reduced the average length of stay but increased the utilization of inpatient procedures so that the net impact on total costs per stay is ambiguous

hospital scale economies due to stochastic demand and service abstract this paper uses queuing theory to approximate empirically the potential for hospital scale economies due to the stochastic nature of hospital demand and service these results suggest that scale economies due to stochastic demand and service are likely to be important only for the consolidation of small specialized hospital units

multi product costs and standby capacity derived from queuing theory the case of belgian hospitals empirical hospital cost function studies can be divided into two categories studies estimating traditional multi product cost functions and studies including demand uncertainty assuming that hospitals provide standby capacity to cope with uncertain demand and stressing that the relationship between the uncertain demand excess capacity and costs should be investigated most studies include the inverse of the occupancy rate in a relatively basic cost function the first contribution of this paper is to incorporate an indicator of reserve capacity into a genuine multi product cost function the second contribution is to propose an alternative indicator to proxy the reserve margin the often used occupancy rate has an important shortcoming the same occupancy rate can hide different turnaway probabilities and waiting times obscuring the true degree of reservation quality since turnaway probabilities and waiting times are typical queuing theory indicators an indicator for average waiting time derived

estimating demand elasticities under rationing eliminating rationing in the united kingdom following the second world war was a concern for policy makers because of potentially large fluctuations in post war prices and the impact on unrationed goods this study shows that in using virtual prices elasticities can be estimated from a free demand system consistent with observed consumer choices substitution estimates without accounting for rationing are misleading in contrast using virtual prices and estimating a free market system yield results similar to those of the pre war period results show that food rationing affected expenditure across unrationed goods rationing on other services had little effect on expenditure across unrationed goods

comments by professor james tobin professor tobin was invited to reflect upon the experiment in applied econometrics at the workshop convened to discuss the experiment s results he discussed his education in econometrics and the contexts both economic and technical in which his paper of 1950 on the demand for food was written he outlined the concerns facing econometricians of that time to explain some aspects of his approach and compared these to the worries of the econometricians taking part in the experiment 1997 john wiley sons ltd

uncertain demand the structure of hospital costs and the cost of empty hospital beds abstract in this paper we reformulate the theory of cost and production to take account of uncertain demand facing a firm in the reformulated theory the duality between cost and production no longer obtains and demand distribution parameters enter the cost function as well as the traditional outputs and input prices we then estimate a short run cost function for a hospital facing uncertain demand using data from a national sample of over 5000 hospitals for the years 1983 1987 the traditional cost model is strongly rejected in favor of the reformulated model this model is used to calculate the cost of empty hospital beds controlling for the effect of uncertain demand on the structure of hospital costs the cost of an empty hospital bed is calculated as 36 443 in 1987 dollars we estimate that a one percent decrease in the number of hospital beds would decrease hospital costs by slightly over one third of one percent increasing the occupancy rate from the average 1992 level 65 percent back to the average 1980 level 76 percent is estimated to save the average hospital over 2 million or 9 5 percent of costs

short run long run and cross elasticities of gasoline demand in brazil gasoline is one of the most important of the oil derived products its importance is closely related to its participation in the value of imports of many countries and in a number of cases it is one of the determinants of their balance of payment deficit fiscal deficit and economic growth as opposed to most nations brazil has had a gasoline substitute since 1985 alcohol many studies have tried to estimate the income and price elasticities of the demand for gasoline in several countries this paper extends previous studies by estimating the cross price elasticity between gasoline and alcohol our findings indicate that alcohol is an imperfect substitute for gasoline even in the long run as a consequence the need for a new fuel substitution must be initiated long before petroleum reserves vanish

richard stone s contributions to economics richard stone published his first scientific studies in the late 1930s during world war ii he worked on various government assignments his work during this period on national income estimates and more extensive national accounts for england turned out to be of particular importance for future research in economics stone was involved in this work as early as 1940 and carried out pioneering studies in collaboration with j e meade and in contact with j m keynes most of stone s writings are rigorously technical and soberly impersonal however in an article 45 1 on the development and use of national income estimates he added some interesting personal glimpses from this period he also formulated a somewhat more personal creed than is usually found in his works it would seem worthwhile to quote an excerpt anyone who believes in the maintenance of a social economy and the avoidance of the totalitarian direction of all aspects of economic life must be concerned at the present time with the creation of an institutional framework which will permit a social economy with the essential features of free markets free choice of occupations and free choice in the spending of disposable income to function more in accordance with contemporary social ideals in the achievement of this goal and in re drafting the rules of the economic game in such a way that both laissez faire and overall physical control are rejected as a basis for economic organization national income and expenditure studies and their extension to the technique of national budgeting have i believe a great deal to offer stone then went on to discuss how the economy can be made to function more in accordance with contemporary social ideals and referred first and foremost to stabilization of economic activity equalization of income distribution and different forms of intervention in the competitive mechanism

how much can co2 emissions be reduced if fossil fuel subsidies are removed abstract this paper analyzes consumers price elasticities of demand for fossil fuels and how a reduction of fossil fuel subsidies can lead to important reduction in co 2 emissions for various groups of countries that have relatively high fossil fuel subsidies and notably on diesel including countries in the middle east and north africa mena these countries continue to maintain significant levels of fuel subsidies with iran and saudi arabia being the largest contributors to co 2 emissions this paper illustrates that fuel price policy reforms by these countries would be an important instrument for both climate and economic policies we estimate that a reduction in subsidies to both gasoline and diesel by about 20 us cents per liter will lead to significant decreases in co 2 emissions both in the mena region and globally in iran for example the reductions could be up to 90 and 50 of current emissions generated from diesel and gasoline consumption respectively and for saudi arabia approximately 70 and 40 respectively

analysing gasoline demand elasticities a survey this paper is a survey of studies on gasoline demand although there are very many dxerent studies in this eld which sometimes appear to arrive at contradictory results we find that with proper stratification of studies by model and data type much of the contict turns to consensus in this survey we classtfy studies by data type and by ten d erent categories of model and with the exception of estimates on seasonal data which tend to be unstable and of certain inappropriate model formulations we find a fair degree of agreement concerning average short run and even long run income and price elasticities

evaluating a seasonal fuel tax in a mass tourism destination a case study for the balearic islands abstract this paper estimates the monthly aggregate demand for diesel oil and gasoline in a mass tourism region characterized for a high level of seasonality using time series models price elasticities are estimated with special emphasis in evaluating differences between seasons in order to assess the consequences of a fuel tax applied exclusively during the high season using the case study of the balearic islands spain from january 1999 to december 2010 results from a partial adjustment model show a relatively low price elasticity evidencing how the internalizing mechanism that could be argued for introducing the tax in order to reduce transport externalities does not work additionally no statistical differences have been found between seasons for both fuels invalidating the argument that tourism activity reacts differently to host activity

the aggregate effects of health insurance evidence from the introduction of medicare this paper investigates the effects of market wide changes in health insurance by examining the single largest change in health insurance coverage in american history the introduction of medicare in 1965 i estimate that the impact of medicare on hospital spending is over six times larger than what the evidence from individual level changes in health insurance would have predicted this disproportionately larger effect may arise if market wide changes in demand alter the incentives of hospitals to incur the fixed costs of entering the market or of adopting new practice styles i present some evidence of these types of effects a back of the envelope calculation based on the estimated impact of medicare suggests that the overall spread of health insurance between 1950 and 1990 may be able to explain about half of the increase in real per capita health spending over this time period

estimating the demand for gasoline in developing countries senegal abstract this paper estimates the aggregate demand for gasoline in senegal from 1970 to 2008 the long term and short term elasticities of demand with respect to gasoline prices and income are of paramount interest in this study in senegal rising food prices unemployment and shortage of electric supply are always associated with the spiking cost of world oil prices to understand the external shocks of world oil price and demand for gasoline in senegal this study tested a log linear model against the linear model of the demand for oil function with lagged dependent variables as an explanatory variable here the linear specification of the demand for oil is rejected in this study in favor of the log linear the natural log transformation is typical when using high frequency data and significantly reduces skewness and kurtosis generally in this study i found that short run elasticity is smaller than long run elasticity and gasoline demand is inelastic with respect to both price and income for both the short and long runs in senegal this is why researcher like moosa posits that this assertion can be rationalised on the grounds that oil is such an important commodity that does not have close substitutes at least for its uses 1998 p 3

road transport energy demand in australia a cointegration approach abstract a cointegration framework is used to examine the short run and long run characteristics of energy demand in the australian road transport sector a lagged endogenous equation based on a partial adjustment process is proposed and estimated results indicate that energy demand output and real energy prices are integrated of order 1 and cointegrated the long run output and price elasticities of energy demand are estimated to be 0 52 and 0 12 respectively causality tests ervealed a bidirectional causality path between output and energy demand and a unidirectional path from energy consumption to prices no other causality paths between output prices and energy demand are detected the short run output elasticity of energy demand is estimated to be 0 25 based on an error correction model the short run price elasticity is found to be insignificant the inertia parameter is 0 48 corresponding to 95 of the demand adjustment occurring after five periods the results are compared with previous findings and the variations are partially attributed to the structural changes in the road transport sector in the 1980s some of which are discussed

the economies of massed reserves the economy of massed reserves first mentioned by e a g robinson 1958 pp 26 27 is now firmly established in the industrial organization literature as an example of a potential plant level scale economy the massing of reserves results in a savings in the proportion of required reserves to expected output as the scale of a facility increases examples of such reserves are bank tellers specialized tools and equipment repairmen inventories spare parts and checkout lines the potential economies from massing reserves are dependent on the underlying stochastic processes governing the supply and or demand of the service provided theoretical justification for the economies of massed reserves has usually been based on an appeal to the law of large numbers for example donald hay and derek morris wrote the law of large numbers makes the number of breakdowns more predictable in a plant using a large number of machines so that the number of stand by maintenance staff need not be increased in proportion to size 1979 p 44 this paper demonstrates that the law of large numbers does not provide a theoretical explanation of massed reserves scale economies instead it is shown that the expected economies of massed reserves can be calculated from the steady state properties of well known queuing models queuing models apply to any case where a servicing input is held in reserve to cope with the stochastic nature of the market or production process in addition a method for quantifying the expected economies of queuing processes is developed the magnitude of these expected economies is shown to be significant and calculable for example the expected economies inherent in a widely applied queuing model are shown to exceed 23 percent in some cases section i establishes the irrelevance of the law of large numbers as a theory of scale economies section ii provides a formal method for determining the scale economies inherent in the most often mentioned massed reserves example machine repair section iii shows that the same method can be used to calculate scale economies for the remaining massed reserves examples specialized repair tools and equipment checkout counter clerks bank tellers and other service personnel capacity and inventories and spare parts in addition it is demonstrated that the same method can be used to calculate scale economies for some multiproduct operations

technical change and scale economies given stochastic demand and production abstract this paper provides a formal attempt to separate the effects of changes in scale and technology for a relatively general class of queuing models the paper makes a distinction between the output rate and capacity while changes in technology affect the output rate and lead to larger indivisible production units this change in the output rate has often been confused in the literature as a change in scale as a result the importance of scale economies claimed has often been due more to the potential for technological change not the potential for scale economies inherent to these queuing processes

a multiple output multiple input model of the hospital industry in north carolina 1983 a multiple output multiple input model of the hospital industry in north carolina applied economics vol 15 no 3 pp 341 352

impact of input substitution and output transformation on data envelopment analysis decisions abstractdata envelopment analysis dea can aid managerial decision making because it offers an opportunity to measure organizational performance in a holistic manner aggregating data from partial indicators into a single comprehensive measure however there are some methodological hazards associated with the use of dea that are especially relevant to managerial decisions but which have been largely ignored in the literature herein we identify and show the impact of a ubiquitous methodological hazard in dea modelling the economic assumptions regarding input substitutions and output transformations

the specification of a hospital cost function a comment on the recent literature in the empirical estimation of hospital cost functions two radically different types of specifications have been chosen to date ad hoc forms and flexible functional forms based on neoclassical production theory this paper discusses the respective strengths and weaknesses of both approaches and emphasizes the apparently unreconcilable conflict between the goals of maintaining functional flexibility and keeping the number of variables manageable if at the same time patient heterogeneity is to be adequately reflected in the case mix variables a new specification is proposed which strikes a compromise between these goals and the underlying assumptions are discussed critically

efficiency of health care delivery systems effects of health insurance coverage health insurance expansions may increase the demand for care creating incentives for health systems to increase input consumption the possibility remains that added capacity and personnel will have little effect on health outcomes decreasing the technical efficiency of health care delivery systems we estimate that a 1 percentage point increase in health insurance coverage decreases the technical efficiency of health care delivery by 1 3 percentage points translating into approximately 50 billion dollars in additional health expenditures this finding uncovers a previously unexplored consequence of changes in health insurance on the supply side of health care markets suggesting one avenue through which health care costs growth may occur

the economics of medicare equilibrium within the medical community this paper partially fills a theoretical void by developing an integrated model of the various branches of the medical community a consistent and general framework is adopted to analyze equilibrium within the market for medical services under a stylized form of socialized medicine without invoking demand shifting the optimization problem faced by each agent is specified and the equilibrium is defined the effect of various parameter changes on the market for medical services is analyzed the predictions are not contradicted by the stylized facts

the impact of nearly universal insurance coverage on health care utilization evidence from medicare the onset of medicare eligibility at age 65 leads to sharp changes in the health insurance coverage of the u s population these changes lead to increases in the use of medical services with a pattern of gains across socioeconomic groups that varies by type of service while routine doctor visits increase more for groups that previously lacked insurance hospital admissions for relatively expensive procedures like bypass surgery and joint replacement increase more for previously insured groups that are more likely to have supplementary coverage after 65 reflecting the relative generosity of their combined insurance package under medicare

health insurance eligibility utilization of medical care and child health two economists applied data from the current population survey and the national health interview survey and state level data on child mortality to a simulation model of utilization of medical care that varies only with the states legislative environment to examine the utilization of medical care and health effects of medicaid eligibility on low income children the models took into consideration the recent expansions of medicaid to low income children 38 of those ineligible for medicaid in 1984 who became eligible due to changes during 1984 1992 were uninsured between 1984 and 1992 expansions of the medicaid program increased the proportion of children eligible for medicaid almost two fold 16 1 vs 31 2 yet coverage rates were always lower than eligibility rates 13 2 vs 16 1 in 1984 and 20 3 vs 31 2 in 1992 and the increase in coverage rates was only about 50 of the increase in eligibility rates during 1984 1992 the probability that a child was eligible for medicaid increased the probability of health insurance coverage by 29 77 when the model considered bias in variables e g a recession in a state the take up rate was only 22 73 nevertheless medicaid markedly increased use of medical care for example eligibility for medicaid increased the likelihood of making a visit to a physicians office in the last two weeks by about 50 it also increased the probability of a child visiting the hospital suggesting inefficiency in the way that providers deliver care to medicaid enrollees medicaid eligibility had a significant effect on reducing child mortality the 15 1 percentage point increase in eligibility during 1984 1992 reduced child mortality by 4 5 when the researchers examined parent assessed subjective health measures medicaid eligibility had no effect on child health medicaid eligibility reduced race and education based disparities in the number of visits and racial differences in mortality yet it may actually intensify current disparities in health care delivery site