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In this chapter, I review recent evidence on the developmental origins of health inequality. I discuss the origins of the education-health gradient, the long-term costs caused by early life adversity, and how early life experiences affect the biology of the body. Additionally, I provide complementary evidence on enrichment interventions which can at least partially compensate for these gaps. I highlight emerging lines of scientific inquiry which are likely to have a significant impact on the field. I argue that, while the evidence that early life conditions have long-term effects is now uncontroversial, the literature needs to be expanded both in a theoretical and empirical direction. On the one hand, a model linking early life origins to ageing needs to be developed; on the other hand, a better understanding of the mechanisms – both biological and socioeconomic – is required, in order to design more effective interventions.

The main purpose of this research is to (1) prioritise key determinants of Industry 4.0 (I4.0) readiness assessment and (2) evaluate causal relationships among those determinants and associated sub-criteria based on inputs from industry experts.

The methodology involved two phases: (1) an MCDM approach for determining causal relationships among determinants and (2) empirical validation of findings from the first phase using industry experts' inputs.

It was found that while the choice of I4.0 technologies is important, organisational factors are also critical, as evidenced by the ranking of the “Strategy and Organisation” determinant as the highest rank prominent determinant. Also, the ranking of the sub-criteria within each determinant shows the importance of several organisational influencing and resulting sub-criteria.

This research extends the existing literature on I4.0 by demonstrating the prioritisation of determinants and delineating causal relationships among them and associated sub-criteria as a basis for developing I4.0 adoption guidelines. This research is limited to the specific scope of determinants selected/considered and experts' inputs from the Sri Lankan manufacturing sector. Future studies could consider extending this research into a broader global manufacturing context.

Prioritisation and causal relationships of I4.0 readiness assessment determinants, supported with inputs from functional managers and industry experts, could be used to guide practitioners in developing guidelines for I4.0 adoption in a phased manner.

This research provides a re-evaluation and validation of a selected I4.0 readiness assessment framework from the perspectives of interdependencies and casual relationships among its determinants and sub-criteria, based on inputs from industry experts as a basis for developing guidelines for I4.0 adoption.

To determine the factors that motivate rural households to supply ganyu labor and to estimate its impact on food security.

Data from the 2010/2011 Malawi household survey were used. A probit model to evaluate the determinants of ganyu labor supply and a propensity score-matching estimator to assess its impact on food security were used.

Less educated males are more likely to supply ganyu labor. Ganyu labor supply increases with household size, while it decreases with the level of crop farming and size of land owned. Results from the average treatment effect indicate a positive and significant impact of ganyu labor participation on the number of meals consumed per day.

Ganyu labor participants in Malawi have better access to food as a result of cash income from ganyu. Government support mechanisms such as minimum wage regulations should consider the welfare of ganyu labor participants.

Financial sustainability in emerging market economies crucially depends on stable foreign capital inflows as these countries lack adequate domestic capital and sophisticated technology. This study attempts to examine the impact of major political risk factors in the emerging market economies along with basic economic fundamentals such as institutional variables like per capita electric consumption, trade openness, and real rate of interest. We have followed a static panel data approach in studying the impact of these crucial variables in Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) inflows in 15 major emerging economies for the period 2000–2014. Risk perceptions, i.e., political risk data, have been collected from the International Country Risk Guide (ICRG) provided by the Political Risk Services (PRS) Group. In our research purpose, we have considered dependent variable as FDI inflows for 15 emerging countries during the period 2000–2014, which are drawn from the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD, 2014, 2015) FDI database. Our results demonstrate that there are six subcomponents of risk perception (political risk) which are statistically significant in explaining variation in FDI inflows of the major emerging countries. The results show that government stability, socioeconomic conditions, religious tension, and bureaucracy quality have a positive impact on FDI inflows of emerging countries, whereas internal conflict and law and order have a negative impact on FDI inflows of these countries. Stable government is more attractive to foreign investors. Again, an improvement in the socioeconomic conditions is positively related with FDI inflows in emerging countries. Decreasing bureaucracy leads to a reduction in corruption, and assists expanding FDI flows in the emerging country.

Claims and disputes are often unavoidable in the construction industry due to its unique and complex characteristics involving the massive investment of capital, lengthy project duration, and multiple project stakeholders. This chapter intends to identify the critical construction claims attributes, compare the perceptions of major stakeholders on different claim attributes, and investigate the contrast of the top five claim attributes between this study and previous ones. The literature review resulted in 48 claim attributes responsible for the construction project schedule delays. These attributes were then presented to Vietnam construction industry (VCI) practitioners in the form of a questionnaire survey. Data analysis was done based on the collected 113 qualified samples. Relative importance index (RII) was applied to determine the ranking of claim attributes. The results were that the top five causes of claims, that is, payment delays, mistakes by contractor during construction stage, delays in work progress by the contractor, financial failure of the contractor, and frequently changing requirements by the owner, lead to the schedule delays in VCI. These findings can assist the local industry practitioners and foreign companies seeking a share in the VCI market in understanding the causes of construction claims comprehensively and formulating the countermeasures to minimise their impacts and hence reduce the unnecessary losses and raise the likelihood of success as well as maintain sustainable relationships among stakeholders.

Peers and friends are among the most influential social forces affecting adolescent behavior. In this chapter, the authors investigate peer effects on post high school career decisions and on school choice. The authors define peers as students who are in the same classes and social clubs and measure peer effects as spatial dependence among them. Utilizing recent developments in spatial econometrics, the authors formalize a spatial multinomial choice model in which individuals are spatially dependent in their preferences. The authors estimate the model via pseudo maximum likelihood using data from the Texas Higher Education Opportunity Project. The authors do find that individuals are positively correlated in their career and college preferences and examine how such dependencies impact decisions directly and indirectly as peer effects are allowed to reverberate through the social network in which students reside.

This study examines the extent to which regulatory policy uncertainty, macroeconomic risk, banking industry innovations, etc. influence variability in financial sector development among emerging economies in sub-Sahara Africa (SSA).

Data for the empirical inquiry were compiled from a sample of 25 economies from the subregion from 2010 to 2020. Empirical estimates examining the relationships noted above were carried out using the two-step system generalized method of moments estimation technique.

Results the empirical estimates suggest that regulatory policy uncertainty and macroeconomic risk adversely influence or constrain financial sector development among the economies examined in the study. Banking industry innovations on the other hand is found to positively influence the development of the financial sector in these economies. Furthermore, moderating empirical analysis suggests that effective governance positively moderates the relationship between banking industry innovations and financial development among economies in the subregion.

This study’s approach to the mechanics of financial development among economies in SSA is designed to offer different perspectives to those found in the existing literature on financial development in three fundamental ways. First, although the verification of the role of banking industry innovations in financial development may not be new, it is important to point out that the approach used in this study is based on an index for innovations with different constituents or principal components in its construction; making the variable significantly different from what has been examined in the literature. In addition, the review of regulatory policy uncertainty and macroeconomic risk (both variables are multifaceted constructs using the principal component analysis procedure) further brings into this study’s analysis, a different approach to examining conditions influencing variability in financial development among developing economies.

This study examined the influence of income and health insurance on the health-seeking behaviour of rural residents, addressing the concerns of endogeneity and heterogeneity bias.

A two-stage residual inclusion was utilised to correct self-selection-based endogeneity problems arising from health insurance membership.

This study provides support for Andersen's behavioural model (ABM). Income and health insurance positively stimulate rural residents' use of modern healthcare services, but the effect of insurance risks a downward bias if treated as exogenous. Further, the effect of health insurance differs between males and females and between adults and the elderly.

This study advances the literature, arguing that, within the ABM framework, enabling (i.e. income and insurance) and predisposing factors (i.e. age and gender) complement each other in explaining rural residents' use of modern health services.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-03-2023-0223

Stock markets are highly sensitive to foreign and domestic events. Stock exchange markets react promptly to news and are known as an indicator of good and bad trading conditions. Terrorist attacks leave adverse effects on the economy and cause stock price volatility and, consequently, stock return volatility. Therefore, this paper aims to analyze the spatial effects of terrorism on stock market returns in the Middle East from 2008 to 2019.

This paper uses analytical research design and estimates spatial model. Before estimating the spatial model, the spillover effects were confirmed for the spatial autoregressive model using Moran’s diagnostic test for spatial dependence, Geary’s C test and Akaike statistic.

The results of this study on spatial panel data and based on spatial autoregressive estimator indicated that terrorism and associated neighborhood effects had a negative impact on stock returns in Middle East countries. Also, the corruption index and oil price negatively affected stock market return in these countries, while the democracy index had a positive effect on stock market returns. According to the results, to achieve a high and stable stock market return, it is recommended that high-level consultation is pursued with leaders of involved countries to reduce the devastating effects of terrorist activities, increase political and economic stability, attract stockholders to stock markets and spend corresponding incomes developing the infrastructures in this sector in countries of this region.

Most of the studies have investigated the impact of terrorism on the stock market returns at the national or provincial level. However, the effect of terrorism on the stock market index in the tense region of the Middle East, which is the center of terrorist attacks in the world, has not been dealt with by considering the spatial econometric effects. Thus, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is a first attempt to study the impact of terrorism on the stock market returns in Middle East countries using the spatial econometric approach.

Rapid innovation and developments in personal electronic technology have encouraged users to change users' devices more frequently than ever, which has resulted in creating a massive increase in the amount of electronic waste. The study focuses on identifying the barriers to closed-loop supply chain (CLSC) in the electronic industry.

A framework for analyzing the relationships among CLSC adoption barriers is designed. The authors adopted the decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) technique to determine the critical barriers of electronic CLSC from the opinion of experts in the field.

The outcome from the analysis suggests that cost barriers, financial barrier, process barriers and supplier-side barriers are the main causal factors that prevent the adoption and implementation of e-waste CLSC. The causal relationship indicates that financial barrier is the most influential factor, while phycological barrier is the most flexible barrier to the adoption of e-waste CLSC.

This study is restricted to CLSC adoption barriers in the electronic industry by evaluating 36 sub-barriers grouped into 8 main dimensions related to different members of the supply chain.

Closed-loop adoption barriers have been proposed to understand the crucial barriers to implementation of CLSC in the electronic industry. The cause-and-effect relationship indicates the critical factors to be improved to increase adoption of e-waste CLSC, helping managers and regulatory bodies to mitigate the problem areas.

This study contributes to the literature on CLSC by adopting a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) technique which captures the critical barriers of e-waste CLSC adoption in Indian scenario.