The main objective of the paper is to develop a methodology for evaluating the comparative performance of public sector industries producing the same commodity, but operating in different socio-economic environments. However, a dully satisfactory methodology could not be developed as it had to be adjusted to the contents of available data which were collected prior to the formulation of any such methodology. What the paper, therefore, attempts to do is to indicate the essential ingredients of an appropriate methodology. These are applied on the data on the cement industry in three countries–Bangladesh, India and Sri Lanka–collected in the course of an IDRC Project on public enterprise performance. Value-added per unit of resource use has been used as the main criterion of comparing their performance.

The purpose of the study is to examine the variation in knowledge and usage of contraceptive methods across Bangladesh villages. The main hypothesis is that the variation can be explained by three sets of factors measured at the village-level : development programmes, family planning programme efforts, and given environmental and socio-economic conditions. Data are drawn from the Bangladesh Fertility Survey and the 1974 Bangladesh Population Census. The three sets of factors taken together explain a greater proportion of the variance in knowledge and usage of contraceptive methods than each of the sets taken singly or in paired combination. Knowledge of clinical contraceptive methods is found to be affected more by development programmes than by either family planning or environmental and socio-economic conditions. Knowledge of non-clinical contraceptive methods, on the other hand, is affected more by given environmental and socio-economic conditions. While both development and family planning variables have independent and approximately equal effects on ever use of contraception, each of them separately is not likely to produce as much contraceptive usage as would both of them jointly. The policy implication of this finding is that if both development and family planning programmes are provided to the villages, the impact on fertility may be maximized.

This paper attempts to estimate the foodgrains demand elasticities of rural households in Bangladesh by using pooled cross-section data from several rounds of a family budget survey known in short as the QSCEC. The estimated elasticities are income-class-specific and are based on a demand-theoretic specification of the own-price, cross-price and income elasticities of consumer demand. The estimation of these elasticities can be useful in analysing the effects of changes in foodgrains prices on defferent economic groups and in devising a sound food policy. The statistical results are of particular interest for testing some standard hypotheses regarding consumers’ behaviour at extremely low levels of living such as obtain in rural Bangladesh.