Major Product Categories Research Articles

Estimating the costs of non-fatal consumer product injuries in the United States

This paper describes a data-driven injury cost model (ICM) developed to estimate the costs associated with non-fatal consumer product injuries. The modeling effort combines information by diagnosis from the US Consumer Product Safety Commission’s National Electronic Injury Surveillance System (NEISS) and 17 other large data sets. The ICM contains four aggregated cost components: (1) medical costs, (2) work losses, (3) quality of life and pain and suffering costs, and (4) product liability insurance administration and litigation costs. The ICM estimates societal costs, which are broader than costs to any individual group, such as victims, insurers, or product manufacturers. Costs associated with consumer product injuries are estimated to be approximately $500 billion in 1996, accounting for nearly one-third of the total annual injury costs. We examine injury costs in several ways, including by major product category, by sex and age of victims, by body part injured, by injury diagnosis, and by highest level of medical treatment received. We also rank the 10 leading consumer products that account for injury costs overall and within different age groups. Products such as stairs and floors are among the top 10 for all age groups. Other products, however, are more closely tied to injuries at particular stages of life (e.g., infant/toddler, child, young adult, elderly). These cost estimates are useful in assessing which products and types of injuries impose the greatest costs on society and for identifying areas for focused injury prevention efforts.

LONG-TERM PERSPECTIVES OF FRUIT AND OTHER TREE CROPS IN THE NEW CENTURY

The proportion of tree crops to annual crops will increase during the coming century. Tree crops are more input efficient and environmentally safer. For each of the major agricultural product categories arising from traditional annual crops, a list of corresponding or potential perennial crops is given. Among the fruit species some of the newer universal consumer adoptions like mango, avocado, litchi are all tree crops. However, some of the major constraints with tree crop husbandry should be lifted as e.g. pruning and harvesting. Finally, one ought to give new consideration for combining drip irrigated trees with (partial) animal husbandry.

A natural experiment of the effect of advertising on sales: the SASOL case

The effect of advertising in a major product category (petrol) on the market share of a brand (petrol produced by SASOL of South Africa) was estimated using variants of a Koyck distributed lag model. Our use of a single-equation model was supported by Granger causality tests showing that advertising caused sales, but that sales did not simultaneously cause advertising. The situation is a unique natural experiment in that non-promotional variables in the marketing mix (price, location of sale and product characteristics) are largely invariant between SASOL's petrol and competing brands, allowing isolation of the effect of advertising on market share. Dummy variables were used to allow for the varying effect of different advertising campaigns and thus allow for the quality of advertising copy. The results supported the hypotheses that sales are determined by past as well as current advertising expenditures, but that the cumulative effects of advertising lasts for months rather than years. The major finding ...

Health equipment bulletin news

These evaluations of electromedical equipment will soon focus on single items only rather than covering batches of items within a category. This will allow critical evaluations to reach the consumer more quickly after the introduction of the product. Summaries of the reports will still be collected, however, and will appear as a ‘review issue’ produced annually for the major product categories. This change-over from batch to single reports will take place over the next year. In the meantime, issue 189 (March 1989) contains full reports on six non-invasive blood pressure recorders and issue 190 (March 1989) reports on six ECG recorders.

Retail Grocery Pricing: Inner City, Suburban, and Rural Comparisons

Previous studies of price comparisons between suburban and urban areas have, by their own admission, encountered deficiencies in the data, largely because of the complexities in data collection. An equally serious question is the comparison of rural grocery prices to those of metropolitan areas. The magnitude of the issue coupled with the deficiencies of knowledge in the composition of food budgets make grocerypricing research most timely. Contrary to widely advanced belief, the grocery prices faced by urban poor or, as more usually defined, residents of the inner city are not significantly greater than prices in suburban groceries. In some instances they are lower. Donaldson and Strangways (1973) reported that the poor consistently received groceries at a lower price than those of the stores in more affluent neighborhoods. These findings confirmed the earlier conclusions of Alcaly and Klevorick (1971), who found that grocery prices tended to be elastic and not discriminatory toward the poor of the ghetto areas: . . rarely does the price of a commodity tend to increase as the median family of the neighborhood decreases. In general, the price-income relationships found commodity by commodity, in both chain stores and other stores, are insignificant or show that the commodity's price rises with the level of neighborhood income (p. Grocery-pricing difference between inner city and suburban neighborhoods has been a repeated topic of concern and study. This current study expands upon these previous designs with the inclusion of rural areas. The data collected indicated that people in the rural areas are in the upper extreme of the price spectrum. Conversely, the inner city prices are decidedly lower than either suburban or rural grocery prices. These price differences were evident not only in the composite prices but also in the major product categories. While these results confirm the findings of prior inner city pricing practices, the disclosure of the higher prices in rural areas adds a significant dimension to pricing studies.