Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1990. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 97-106).

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Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / Most African states today are facing the serious challenge of socio-economic development. This is a problem not generated by the paucity of material and natural resources, but rather by challenges arising from mismanagement of these resources. Nigeria is in fact, a good example of a country in Africa facing socio-economic development challenges not as a result of lack of resources, but rather the mismanagement of abundant resources at its disposal. This mismanagement is associated with the culture of prebendal, clientelist and neo-patrimonial politics which have made it extremely difficult for technocrats and bureaucrats to contribute adequately to the development of the country. In fact, as will be demonstrated in this thesis, technocrats in Nigeria are not allowed to occupy sensitive economic development positions for a sustained period of time and are never the driving forces in the formulation of socio-economic development policies and initiatives. In this country bureaucrats and technocrats have not been a stable force for development- given the constant changes of these groups by the political leadership and the splitting of sensitive ministerial portfolios for political reasons. Instead, political offices are captured and used for the benefits of office holders and those of their associated factions, class and ethnic groups. This negatively affects the insulation of appointed technocrats and bureaucrats from vested political interests. Therefore, instead of appointing or employing technocrats and seasoned bureaucrats to occupy relevant positions, appointments and employments are done in order for people to share from what is commonly referred to as ‘national cake’ in the parlance of Nigerian politics. Central to the argument of this thesis is that one-party dominance and authoritarianism does not necessarily undermines techno-bureaucratic governance, as the cases of countries like Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore in Asia as well as Botswana and South Africa in Africa suggest, but when such system is associated with politics of prebendalism, clientelism and neo-patrimonialism techno-bureaucratic governance becomes difficult and the achievement of state’s led development becomes more daunting. This work therefore investigates why attempts at promoting prebendalism, clientelism and neo-patrimonialism under Nigeria’s one-party dominant system undermines techno-bureaucratic governance. It also unravels how these have impacted negatively on socio-economic development of the country from 1999 to 2014. This study will contribute to the understanding of how the insulation of technocrats and bureaucrats from vested political interests can contribute to the development of the underdeveloped countries, using the developmental state argument as a basis of analysis.

This research report considers how dominant firms can establish when their competitive strategies are not anti-competitive. It argues that a dominant firm‟s actions can either be pro-competitive, thus conduct which competition law is designed to protect; or, anti-competitive and therefore prohibited. It questions whether there are any key principles that are emerging from South African competition law practice and decided cases that can provide some guidelines to dominant firms on whether planned action is prohibited conduct? It also questions whether the enforcement of the South African Competition Act‟s abuse of dominance provisions may have led to the chilling of competition. The research utilised the following methodologies: expert interviews; case studies; and, review of the competition authorities‟ enforcement actions. The report concludes that abuse of dominance cases are highly fact-intensive, industry specific and outcomes are effects-based. As such, it is difficult to prescribe a general rules-based compliance program to guide dominant firms in their development of competitive strategies. Copyright / Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2010. / Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) / unrestricted

Alcohol dependence is a complex disease involving polygenes, environment and their interactions. Inadequate consideration of these interactions may have hampered the progress on genome-wide association studies of alcohol dependence. By using the dataset of the Study of Addiction: Genetics and Environment with 3838 subjects, we conducted a genome-wide association studies of alcohol dependence symptom count (ADSC) with a full genetic model considering additive, dominance, epistasis and their interactions with ethnicity, as well as conditions of co-morbid substance dependence. Twenty quantitative trait single nucleotide polymorphisms (QTSs) showed highly significant associations with ADSC, including four previously reported genes (ADH1C, PKNOX2, CPE and KCNB2) and the reported intergenic rs1363605, supporting the overall validity of the analysis. Two QTSs within or near ADH1C showed very strong association in a dominance inheritance mode and increased the phenotype value of ADSC when the effect of co-morbid opiate or marijuana dependence was controlled. Highly significant association was also identified in variants within four novel genes (RGS6, FMN1, NRM and BPTF), two non-coding RNA and two epistasis loci. QTS rs7616413, located near PTPRG encoding a protein tyrosine phosphatase receptor, interacted with rs10090742 within ANGPT1 encoding a protein tyrosine phosphatase in an additive × additive or dominance × additive manner. The detected QTSs contributed to about 20 percent of total heritability, in which dominance and epistasis effects accounted for over 50 percent. These results demonstrated that perturbations arising from gene–gene interaction and conditions of co-morbidity substantially influence the genetic architecture of complex trait.

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