[Estimating cost functions of cancer screening programs provided by municipalities]

OBJECTIVE

To estimate cost functions of cancer screening programs for stomach, lung, colorectal, cervical, and breast cancers provided by municipalities and to describe the relationship between the costs and the scale of cancer screening programs.

METHODS

Subjects were all the municipalities in Japan. Questionnaires were sent to 3,182 subjects and 1,860 responses were received. Data obtained from questionnaires were the number of persons screened and the total cost of each program in the 1998 fiscal year. A cost function of each program was specified as a linear model, a power model, and a cubic model, and the fitness of each model was estimated.

RESULTS

Long-run cost functions of all the cancer screening programs allowed better explanation of the relationship between the number of persons screened and the total cost than short-run cost functions. The average costs of stomach, colorectal, and cervical cancer screening programs increased and the average cost of the lung cancer screening program decreased, as the number of persons screened increased. The cost function of the breast cancer screening program could not be identified.

CONCLUSIONS

It is necessary to estimate not only cost functions but also production functions of cancer screening programs using the data related to products, costs, and factors of production to evaluate the efficiency of cancer screening programs.

Ethnographies of place: a new urban research agenda

How might one tap the idioms of vanished communities once local knowledge has faded? How might one chart the mental landscapes of locales that have been overlaid by other people's understandings and whose material forms have been erased by urban redevelopment? This paper integrates history and archaeology as it attempts an ethnographic re-reading of one such precinct in Melbourne, Australia.

Is it possible to build financially sucessful new towns? The Milton Keyness experience

The last generation of British new towns is being completed with the dissolution of the New Towns Development Corporations. As the final chapter of the new town movement in Britain draws to a close, this paper examines their financial success by focusing on Milton Keynes. Reputedly one of the most successful new towns, Milton Keynes was the last new town to be started and had the largest projected population. The paper examines the financial accounting reports from 1971 to 1993 and computes the economic returns for the new town as a whole and for each of the major property types. We find that Milton Keynes lost more than one-half a billion pounds. The paper explores why this happened and what the lessons are for new town development efforts around the world. The paper concludes that while it is possible to develop financially successful new towns, it is extremely difficult.