Selenium (Se) deficiency among populations in Ethiopia is consistent with low concentrations of Se in soil and crops that could be addressed partly by Se-enriched fertilisers. This study examines the disease burden of Se deficiency in Ethiopia and evaluates the cost-effectiveness of Se agronomic biofortification. A disability-adjusted life years (DALY) framework was used, considering goiter, anaemia, and cognitive dysfunction among children and women. The potential efficiency of Se agronomic biofortification was calculated from baseline crop composition and response to Se fertilisers based on an application of 10 g/ha Se fertiliser under optimistic and pessimistic scenarios. The calculated cost per DALY was compared against gross domestic product (GDP; below 1–3 times national GDP) to consider as a cost-effective intervention. The existing national food basket supplies a total of 28·2 µg of Se for adults and 11·3 µg of Se for children, where the risk of inadequate dietary Se reaches 99·1 %–100 %. Cereals account for 61 % of the dietary Se supply. Human Se deficiency contributes to 0·164 million DALYs among children and women. Hence, 52 %, 43 %, and 5 % of the DALYs lost are attributed to anaemia, goiter, and cognitive dysfunction, respectively. Application of Se fertilisers to soils could avert an estimated 21·2–67·1 %, 26·6–67·5 % and 19·9–66·1 % of DALY via maize, teff and wheat at a cost of US$129·6–226·0, US$149·6–209·1 and US$99·3–181·6, respectively. Soil Se fertilisation of cereals could therefore be a cost-effective strategy to help alleviate Se deficiency in Ethiopia, with precedents in Finland.

Urban logistics has emerged as a priority to improve goods distribution and mobility within urban centers worldwide. Brazil presents a unique set of challenges in this regard due to issues such as excessive reliance on road transportation, lack of regulations, inadequate infrastructure, cargo theft, and the intricate interplay of cargo transportation with urban traffic. These challenges collectively exert a substantial influence on the economic, urban, and environmental performance of cities. This article introduces a novel approach aimed at assessing and benchmarking urban logistics performance between Brazilian cities with potential applicability to other contexts. The methodology was based on data envelopment analysis to evaluate efficiency based on key indicators, including GDP Gross Domestic Product, population size, commercial establishments, urban area coverage, cargo fleet size, and travel time. By applying this methodology to 12 Brazilian cities, the study improves the understanding of their relative efficiency levels concerning urban logistics and provides key insights for policymaking. The results also show the relevance of the proposed methodology and contribute to provide a perspective of different administrative and logistical facets through the lens of macroeconomic indicators, contributing to a holistic understanding of urban logistics dynamics.

The goal of this paper is to systematically review the literature on United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) forecast evaluation and critically assess their methods and findings. The fundamental characteristics of optimal forecasts are bias, accuracy and efficiency as well as encompassing and informativeness. This review revealed that the findings of these studies can be very different based on the forecasts examined, commodity, sample period, and methodology. Some forecasts performed very well, while others were not very reliable, resulting in forecast specific optimality record. We discuss methodological and empirical contributions of these studies as well as their shortcomings and potential opportunities for future work.

Relational egalitarians argue that workplace hierarchy is wrong or unjust. However, even if workplace hierarchy is morally deficient in one respect, the efficiency of hierarchical cooperation might vindicate hierarchy. This paper assesses the extent to which relational egalitarians must make concessions to workplace hierarchy for the sake of efficiency. I argue that considerations of hierarchy provide egalitarians with reasons that make workplace hierarchy tolerable despite being unjustified, and, moreover, that under a predominantly hierarchical status quo, the practical import of egalitarian reasons is unlikely to be undercut. This can be the case even if social hierarchy sometimes constitutes social cooperation.

Both Republican and Democratic administrations make regulatory and funding decisions with close reference to benefit–cost analysis (BCA). With respect to regulation, there has been a great deal of academic discussion of BCA and its limits, but almost no attention has been paid to the role of BCA in government funding. That is a serious gap, not least in connection with climate-related risks, such as wildfire, drought, extreme heat, and flooding. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Circular A-94 sets out guidelines for the BCA required when people are applying to many federal discretionary grant programs. Through Circular A-94, OMB has long required applicants to demonstrate that the benefits of their projects would exceed the costs. But under Circular A-94 as it stood for many years, efficiency-based BCA could produce results that fail to maximize welfare and that are also highly inequitable. The 2023 revision of Circular A-94 focuses more directly on welfare and equity, which are now – not uncontroversially – being brought directly into policy. At the same time, the new Circular A-94 raises fresh questions about how best to promote welfare, and to consider equity, in practice. This article explains the economic foundations for promoting welfare through distributional weighting – and how the old BCA guidance fell short. It then offers recommendations on how to operationalize distributional weighting on the ground specifically for government spending programs – and for BCA more broadly.

Using data envelopment analysis, we examine the efficiency of Canada's universal health care system by considering a set of labour (physicians) and capital (beds) inputs, which produce a level of care (measured in terms of health quality and quantity) in a given region. Data from 2013–2015 were collected from the Canadian Institute for Health Information regarding inputs and from the Canadian Community Health Survey and Statistics Canada regarding our output variables, health utility (quality) and life expectancy (quantity). We posit that variation in efficiency scores across Canada is the result of regional heterogeneity regarding socioeconomic and demographic disparities. Regressing efficiency scores on such covariates suggests that regional unemployment and an older population are quite impactful and associated with less efficient health care production. Moreover, regional variation indicates the Atlantic provinces (Newfoundland, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick) are quite inefficient, have poorer economic prospects, and tend to have an older population than the rest of Canada. Oaxaca-Blinder decompositions suggest that the latter two factors explain about one-third of this efficiency gap. Based on our two-stage semi-parametric analysis, we recommend Canada adjust their transfer payments to reflect these disparities, thereby potentially reducing inequality in regional efficiency.

As governments increasingly adopt algorithms and artificial intelligence (AAI), we still know comparatively little about citizens’ support for algorithmic government. In this paper, we analyze how many and what kind of reasons for government use of AAI citizens support. We use a sample of 17,000 respondents from 16 OECD countries and find that opinions on algorithmic government are divided. A narrow majority of people (55.6%) support a majority of reasons for using algorithmic government, and this is relatively consistent across countries. Results from multilevel models suggest that most of the cross-country variation is explained by individual-level characteristics, including age, education, gender, and income. Older and more educated respondents are more accepting of algorithmic government, while female and low-income respondents are less supportive. Finally, we classify the reasons for using algorithmic government into two types, “fairness” and “efficiency,” and find that support for them varies based on individuals’ political attitudes.

This research article represents the design of a simple, smaller, and novel frequency reconfigurable patch antenna for 5G communication using PIN diodes. This antenna operates in both mid-5G and high-5G bands. The antenna is intended to operate in eight distinct modes with three PIN diodes in 5G wireless communication covering 27.46–50 GHz of high-5G band (range n257/n258/n260/n261/n262) and frequencies of the 3–6 GHz of mid-5G band (range n77/n78/n79/n46). The antenna has an overall size of 20 mm × 25 mm × 1.6 mm and is placed upon a low-cost FR4 substrate. A higher radiation efficiency from 75% to 98% is achieved in all the different modes. The resonant frequencies are around 3.46, 4.43, 5.83, 31.8, 35.5, and 46 GHz in different modes of operation. Different switching statuses have been carried out in this research work and their performances have also been illustrated in the form of surface current distribution in different resonant frequencies. The simulated and measured results are compared to highlight its proposed design operation.