Sale of modern medicines by untrained peddlers, general merchants, and other drug sellers is common throughout the developing world. Community-based studies from Africa, Asia, and Latin America have found that up to 70% of illness episodes are self-treated with modern pharmaceuticals.
Public acceptance and appreciation of the private drug seller's role has been clearly recognized. Reasons given by consumers for using retailers include expediency (little time is spent waiting for service), convenience (drug sellers are nearby), efficacy (their drugs work), dependability of supply, and reasonable cost.
It is ironic that while millions of people are dying of starvation each year in most parts of the world, many Americans are dying as an indirect result of an overabundance of food. Further, billions of dollars are spent each year overfeeding the American public, which then leads to the spending of billions of dollars more each year on various weight loss methods. This review will investigate various aspects of overweight and obesity, and show how they are affected by physical activity. But first, we must define and differentiate between the terms overweight and obesity.
The terms overweight and obesity are often used interchangeably, but this is technically incorrect as they have different meanings. Overweight is defined as a body weight that exceeds the normal or standard weight for a particular person, based on his or her height and frame size. These standards are established solely on the basis of population averages. It is quite possible to be overweight according to these standard tables and yet have a body fat content that is average or even below average. For example, almost all college and professional football players are overweight by these tables, but few are overfat. There are also people who are within the normal range of body weights for their height and frame size by the standard tables, but who have, in fact, excessive body fat.
The Asian Crisis of 1997-98 has brought into sharp focus the distinctions between the relationship based economic and financial system prevalent in many emerging economies and the arms length, market-driven system that mainly characterizes the developed economies of Western Europe and North America. One influential view of the crisis (Krugman (1998), Corsetti et al. (1998a), Pomerleano (1998)) goes as far as to suggest that the crisis had it’s origins in the allocation of credit by banks and financial institutions on ‘soft’ terms to friends and relatives often termed cronyism rather than on the basis of ‘hard’ market criteria in the years leading up to the crisis.
While cronyism is anecdotally accepted as an endemic feature of emerging economies, empirical work linking close ties to preferential finance is scant. The goal of this paper is to examine whether cronyism is in fact a good predictor of preferential access to credit using a detailed dataset on Thai firms prior to the crisis period.
