The main purpose of this study was to examine the constructs of the theory of planned behaviour (TPB) in two different exercise settings structured versus unstructured. Owing to the assumption that individuals may perceive less volitional control in a structured setting versus an unstructured setting, it was hypothesized that perceived behavioural control would be a stronger predictor of exercise behaviour in the structured setting. A secondary purpose of the current study was to assess the utility of using two different exercise outcomes energy expenditure and exercise frequency to assess exercise behaviour. Participants (N = 207) were recruited from a first-year kinesiology university class. Data collection occurred over two time periods, nine days apart, and was conducted during class periods. During the first testing session, participants were provided with a questionnaire that assessed TPB constructs and physical activity level in the two settings (structured versus unstructured) using the Modifiable Activity Questionnaire (MAQ). Half of the participants were requested to complete the TPB constructs using energy expenditure as the outcome measure and half were requested to complete the constructs using exercise frequency as the outcome measure. In the second testing session, all participations were asked to report their exercise levels over the previous seven days using the MAQ. In terms of predicting intention, hierarchical regression analyses revealed that, contrary to the hypothesis, perceived behavioural control was more predictive in the unstructured setting versus the structured setting. Although not predicted, it also was found that subjective norms were a significant predictor of activity intention in the structured but not the unstructured setting. The results using the two different outcome measures (e.g., energy expenditure versus frequency) also revealed differences; however, no consistent pattern emerged. One relationship that did emerge was the finding that perceived behavioural control was found to be a stronger predictor of intention in the unstructured setting using energy expenditure as an outcome versus exercise frequency. <p> Finally, the results revealed little support for the TPB constructs predicting self-reported physical activity behaviour. Practical implications and future directions are discussed.

The relationship between health and globalization may be constructed on improving public health through the flow of personnel, the import of medication, the quality improvement of drinking water, the utility of new medical technology, and the use of new medication on patients. Some scholars have pointed out that globalization may affect life expectancy from four aspects as income, education, nutrition, and public health. Unlike the existing literature primarily focuses on the correlation between health expenditure and GDP (gross domestic product), we examine to see whether a cointegration relationship between GDP and health expenditure exists under the impact of globalization by applying the panel cointegration test of Pedroni (1999, 2004) which allows heterogeneous data analysis and the Fully Modified OLS test. This paper mainly conducts a cross-continental comparison by using the data in the period from 1995 to 2004 of an estimate sample of 87 developing countries which consists of 12 European countries, 21 Central and South American countries, 20 Asian countries, and 34 African countries. The result shows that the existence of a cointegration relationship between GDP and health expenditure in both the overall developing countries and the cross-continental sample countries. Generally, investment of health and a fast pace of globalization progress boost GDP; especially in Europe and Asia, globalization is a very important factor in influencing the effectiveness of health expenditure upon GDP. In central and south America, the effect of globalization on the effectiveness of GDP to health expenditure is the most significant. The findings of this paper offer future researchers a different aspect for viewing and studying the correlation between health expenditure and GDP.

Globalization has brought health concerns to the forefront. Moreover, governments, policymakers, and health officials are paying more attention to these health concerns. With the increased cross-national interaction, diseases have more pathways to spread than ever. As countries attempt to ensure access to care and control health expenditure, monitoring and improving the quality of health care is a pressing issue. This paper uses linear regressions to analyze the relationship between prevention and public health expenditure and the rate of measles immunizations in member countries of the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). There is a weak negative relationship between the expenditure and rates of measles immunizations for both private and public expenditure data, suggesting that the higher the expenditure the lower the rates of measles immunizations. Several possible reasons for this phenomenon is discussed in conjunction with the role of health educators as it relates to the use of theory based interventions to improve rates of measles immunizations.

Cattle classified as having low residual feed intake (RFI) phenotypes are those that consume less feed than expected based on body weight and growth performance. Mechanisms contributing to the variation in RFI are not fully understood. Previous studies have shown that cattle of divergent RFI phenotypes have different levels of energy expenditures, which are associated with heat increment, basal metabolism, thermoregulation responses, and physical activity. The objectives of this experiment were to characterize residual feed intake (RFI) in growing heifers and to determine if variation in whole-animal energy expenditure contributes to differences in RFI. Brangus heifers (n =120) were individually fed a roughage-based diet (1.93 Mcal ME/kg DM) diet twice daily and feed refusals measured weekly. Heifers were weighed once weekly for 70 d and RFI calculated as the difference between actual and expected DMI from linear regression of DMI on ADG and mid-test BW0.75. Immediately following the 70 d study, oxygen pulse rate (mL O2/heart beat) and 48-h heart rates were measured on 8 high and 8 low RFI heifers to estimate energy expenditure. Daily heart rates and oxygen pulse rates were higher (P < 0.05) in heifers with high RFI compared to those with low RFI. As a result, energy expenditure (kcal/BW0.75) was estimated to be 17.4 percent greater (P < 0.05) in high-RFI heifers then low-RFI heifers. Mortality and morbidity losses caused by bovine respiratory disease (BRD) continue to negatively impact the net revenues of the beef cattle industry. Stress can predispose calves arriving at feedlots to BRD by impairing their immune system with calves having more excitable temperaments possibly having a greater risk. The objectives of the second study was to examine the effects of metaphylactic treatment and temperament on performance, feed intake, feed efficiency, and feeding behavior traits in steers. Santa Gertrudis steers (n =119) were weighed and randomly to control (CON; no antimicrobial treatment) or metaphylactic (MET; 1.5 mL/45 kg BW of ceftiofur crystalline free acid) treatments. Steers were weighed at 14-d intervals and individual intakes and feeding behavior traits measured using a GrowSafe sytems while fed a roughage-based diet (2.21 Mcal ME/kg DM). Objective (relative exit velocity; REV) and subjective (chute score; CS) measurements of temperament were measured on arrival and on day 28 of the study. Steers with higher REV weighed less, grew slower, consumed less feed, spent less time consuming feeding, had more feeding bouts per meal, had less backfat, smaller longissimus muscle area, and higher cortisol levels. Steers treated with MET had higher ADG than those receiving CON. Cattle with higher REV that received MET had less of a decrease in ADG, DMI, time spend consuming feed, and less of an increase in feeding bouts compared to high REV steers receiving CON. Results from this study suggest that process-control strategies, which quantify and manage inter-animal variation in calf temperament may facilitate more judicious use of antimicrobial products and provide more consistent and predictable responses to metaphylactic strategies.

Abstract Financial transparency has been playing the role of one of the most significant approaches to financial reform since the eighties. This is true of not only advanced countries but also developing countries where democratic awareness is blooming among the public, especially countries in poverty, because people there tend to demand more and more aggressively that the government publish important financial information such as the revenue and annual expenses as they get to realize how much the governmental budget impacts on the economical development and the distribution of resources of the country, and Taiwan is among the rest. As democratic trends cracked Taiwanese autocracy in the late eighties, the government began to take a relatively open stance towards publicizing the budgeting processes and the information concerned. Unfortunately, such changes seem to be limited to the central government only. As for the local governments, however, budgeting still tends to be done in black boxes as always. Indeed, little has been done to enhance the financial transparency of the local governments. People still focus on the facts of local financial difficulties and deficits as well as their demands on the systemization and transparency of central grants-in-aid to the local governments, neglecting the persistent lack of proper financial information publication. What exactly is the cause of local governmental financial unbalance? Does it come from improper expenditure increase or shortage of income or both? Neither the central government nor the local ones have provided solid and complete background information for the public to make their own judgments from. In fact, the central government should actively help the local governments construct handy, thorough financial information databases and thereby optimize the transparency of critical data, minimizing people¡¦s cost for accessing information and maximizing their interest in participating in local public financial affairs. On December 6, 2005, Taiwanese Legislative Yuan passed the Law of Governmental Information Publication to ensure people¡¦s right to knowledge, promoting their understanding of, trust in, and supervision upon public affairs, taking a big step towards administrative and financial transparency. The purposes of this research are: 1. By looking back on the literature concerned, the author wishes to make a comparison between the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in terms of how they define the financial transparency of a member country and thereby to get the industrial circle, the government, the academia, and the general public to better understand and to value the concept of financial transparency. 2. Through depth interviews, the author wishes to institutionally, legally, and administratively explore possible strategies and steps that local governments can take to enhance the financial transparency, so that the general public can be better encouraged to participate in and to supervise local financial administration, raising the efficiency in making good use of resources of all kinds, strengthening local finances. The author suggests that the following steps be taken to enhance local governmental financial transparency: 1. Put together general, concise financial information reports. 2. Open new channels for the publicizing of financial information. 3. Formulate laws and codes concerning governmental financial information release. 4. The central government should build up a platform on which all financial information countrywide can be shown and processed. 5. Set up a national treasury payment information system. Keywords: Financial transparency, Local government, Tax expenditure

Since the implementation of the National Health Insurance (NHI) in Taiwan, the NHI expenditure has grown dramatically. In order to make the most of the precious NHI resources and improve the medical care quality of diabetes mellitus (DM), the Bureau of the NHI (BNHI) has implemented the ¡§pay-by-quality¡¨ (PBQ) system in an attempt to stabilize the financial viability and increase the medical care quality since October, 2001. They incorporated the indicators of medical care quality to evaluate the medical institutions before making a reasonable insurance payment to them. BNHI encouraged hospitals to form the diabetic care network to improve the diabetic care quality and utilize the NHI resources efficiently with the cooperation of medical professionals. A successfully established network is believed to be beneficial to all the concerned parties, including the patients, hospitals, and the NHI. It is noted that the effectiveness of the policy requires further studies. Therefore, this research aimed to examine two subjects with statistical analyses. It attempted to identify the effects of the PBQ system on the outpatient medical resources expenditure of diabetic patients and to investigate whether the outpatient medical resources expenditure of diabetic patients had been significantly lowered by the PBQ system. Furthermore, it aimed to analyze the influences of the characteristics of the patients and hospitals on the outpatient medical resources expenditure of the diabetic patients. The research was a cohort study which analyzed the data of the outpatient medical resources expenditure of diabetic patients in 2004. The control group was randomly selected from the individuals who did not join the PBQ system. The number of samples was determined by the demographic characteristics of the experimental group, consisted by the individuals who had joined the PBQ system. Based on such criteria, 273,738 samples were selected from the population. After the sampling, the data were analyzed by the independent sample t-test and multiple regression analysis. The main findings of this research were as followed: 1. The PBQ system did restrain the outpatient medical resources expenditure of diabetic patients. 2. Different characteristics of both the patients and hospitals indeed had significant effects on the outpatient medical resources expenditure of diabetic patients. However, there were certain limitations of the research. The samples were all selected from the data in 2004 which incurred a less reliable time frame. In addition, merely the independent variables regarding outpatient medical resources expenditure were used in the study. Therefore, it is suggested that future studies should extend the research period and consider other influential elements, such as the inpatient data and the clinic medical care quality indicators, which could provide more insightful and complete findings of the PBQ implementation in terms of diabetic care to both the researchers and practitioners.

HVDC is usually used to link two AC power systems with same or different system frequencies. Nevertheless, even the two AC power systems linked have the same rated system frequency, the actual frequencies of the two AC systems may be different from time to time due to different load conditions. As a result, asynchronous operation occurs to the HVDC system, which leads to a lot of harmonics to be induced. The frequencies of the main harmonic are within several to several tens Hz (i.e. sub-harmonics), which coincide with the turbine resonant frequency range. Therefore, it has the potential of producing the sub-synchronous resonance phenomena. Usually, the sub-synchronous resonance arising from the excitation by the sub-harmonics currents persists only a very short period of time, thereby the induced fatigue loss would not so serious. However, due to the cumulating characteristics, the fatigue loss may reach the dangerous degree if the shafts and blades are persistently subjected to such resonance excitations. According to such a situation, the fatigue life expenditure of the turbine shafts and blades are evaluated in the thesis. It is anticipated that the potential danger of the turbine-generators in conjunction with the operations of HVDC system can be found.

This study explores whether sunk cost effects exist among business managers in Taiwan. Based on the prospect theory and responsibility theory, we explored the impact of manager¡¦s personality traits on sunk cost effects. Besides exploring the effects of risk perception and felt responsibility individually, we went further than previous studies by analyzing the impact of the interaction between the two on sunk cost effects, providing a more integrated explanation for the causes of sunk cost effects. We use experimental research method as research subjects. This study employed 201 managers in listed and OTC Taiwanese firms as subjects, and used moderated regressions to examine the relationship between the variables of interest. The results show that risk perception only affects sunk cost effects under low responsibility conditions; and responsibility only affects sunk cost effects under low risk perception conditions. We also provide the implication of this study.

Schizophrenia is a chronic and debilitating disease that affects approximately one percent of the US population and exerts a disproportionately high financial burden on the society. The objective of this study was to estimate the direct and indirect costs of schizophrenia among community-dwelling US residents and identify patient characteristics associated with high schizophrenia-related direct costs. Patients with a diagnosis of schizophrenia (ICD-9 code 295) or other non-organic psychoses (ICD-9 code 298) between January 1, 2005 and December 31, 2008 were identified from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS). To estimate direct costs, the following cost categories were identified: inpatient hospitalizations, outpatient visits, emergency department visits, office-based physician visits, home healthcare visits, and prescription medications. The following cost categories were identified to estimate indirect costs: caregivers’ costs and cost of lost productivity due to missed work days, reduced employment, and suicide. Logistic regression was used to compare patients belonging to the high-cost group and to the low-cost group. All analyses were carried out using SAS version 9.2 (SAS Institute Inc., Cary, North Carolina). The weighted average number of patients with schizophrenia identified for each year was 757,893. The annual direct and indirect costs were estimated at $3.96 billion and $15.35 billion, respectively. The mean annual direct medical schizophrenia-related cost per patient was $5,586. For each one-year increase in age, patients were 5.7% less likely to be in the high-cost group. Patients with a spouse were 77.7% less likely than patients without a spouse to be in the high-cost group. Healthcare providers and policymakers can use these cost estimates to better understand the economic burden of schizophrenia and identify services and subgroups of patients associated with the highest costs. This would help in the provision of healthcare services to patients with schizophrenia and in the optimization of patient outcomes. / text

This study is about government expenditure in South Africa for the 1960 - 1993 period. It seeks to investigate (i) the sources of growth of government expenditure, (ii) the relative contribution of the major functional categories (i.e. general administration, economic services, social services, and defence expenditure) to the aggregate government expenditure, and (iii) to estimate the future growth in government expenditure given the rate of growth of the economy. The analytical approach adopted in the study is based on the framework developed by Abedian and Standish (1984). In this framework, the contribution of each expenditure category to total expenditure is obtained as the ratio of the product of the percentage change in an expenditure category and the share of that expenditure category in the total to the percentage change in total expenditure. To investigate the sources of the expenditure growth, a model relating expenditure to its determinants is specified and estimated to obtain the expenditure elasticities, which are then used to determine the impact of the changes in each determinant on the expenditure in question. Finally, using the rate of growth of domestic income (GDP), and the long-run income elasticity of demand for government services, the maximum permissible growth of expenditure is determined. With these estimates, the expected shortfall between the desired and actual expenditure is then determined. Our results show that the income elasticities of all the functional expenditures and the total non-defence expenditure were found to be greater than unity, suggesting the presence of the Wagner's law in South Africa during the 1960 - 1993 period. This implies that government expenditure increased more than the proportionate increase in income. Expenditure on administration was the largest contributor to the level of government spending. However, in 1990, social services became the largest contributor and remained at that high level until 1993. The higher the growth in the economy, the larger will be growth in government expenditure. A significantly high growth in the economy was accompanied by a significantly high growth in government expenditure. When the growth in the economy turned to negative, the growth in government expenditure also became negative. / Thesis (M.Soc.Sc. ; Economics) - University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 1998.