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Today’s one of the most important difficulties is tackling climate change and its effects on the environment. The Paris Agreement states that nations must balance the amount of greenhouse gases they emit and absorb until 2050 to contribute to the mitigation of greenhouse gases and to support sustainable development. According to the agreement, each country must determine, plan and regularly report on its contributions. Thus, it is important for the countries to predict and analyze their net zero performances in 2050. Therefore, the aim of this study is to evaluate European Continent Countries' net zero performances at the targeted year.

The European Continent Countries that ratified the Paris Agreement are specified as decision making units (DMUs). Input and output indicators are specified as primary energy consumption, freshwater withdrawals, gross domestic product (GDP), carbon-dioxide (CO₂) and nitrous-oxide (N₂O) emissions. Data from 1980 to 2019 are obtained and forecasted using autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) until 2050. Then, the countries are clustered based on the forecasts of primary energy consumption and freshwater withdrawals using k-means algorithm. As desirable and undesirable outputs arise simultaneously, the performances are computed using Pure Environmental Index (PEI) and Mixed Environmental Index (MEI) data envelopment analysis (DEA) models.

It is expected that by 2050, CO₂ emissions of seven countries remain constant, N₂O emissions of seven countries remain stable and five countries’ both CO₂ and N₂O emissions remain constant. While it can be seen as success that many countries are expected to at least stabilize one emission, the likelihood of achieving net zero targets diminishes unless countries undertake significant reductions in emissions. According to the results, in Cluster 1, Turkey ranks last, while France, Germany, Italy and Spain are efficient countries. In Cluster 2, the United Kingdom ranks at last, while Greece, Luxembourg, Malta and Sweden are efficient countries.

In the literature, generally, CO₂ emission is considered as greenhouse gas. Moreover, none of the studies measured the net-zero performance of the countries in 2050 employing analytical techniques. This study objects to investigate how well European Continent Countries can comply with the necessities of the Agreement. Besides CO₂ emission, N₂O emission is also considered and the data of European Continent Countries in 2050 are estimated using ARIMA. Then, countries are clustered using k-means algorithm. DEA models are employed to measure the performances of the countries. Finally, forecasts and models validations are performed and comprehensive analysis of the results is conducted.

This paper aims to provide insights into the environment needed for advancing a digitally enabled circular plastic economy in Africa. It explores important technical and social paradigms for the transition.

This study adopted an interpretivist paradigm, drawing on thematic analysis on qualitative data from an inter-sectoral engagement with 69 circular economy stakeholders across the continent.

The results shows that, while substantial progress has been made with regard to the development and deployment of niche innovations in Africa, the overall progress of circular plastic economy is slowed due to relatively minimal changes at the regime levels as well as pressures from the exogenous landscape. The study highlights that regime changes are crucial for disrupting the entrenched linear plastic economy in developing countries, which is supported by significant sunk investment and corporate state capture.

The main limitation of this study is with the sample as it uses data collected from five countries. Therefore, while it offers a panoramic view of multi-level synergy of actors and sectors across African countries, it is limited in its scope and ability to illuminate country-specific nuances and peculiarities.

The study underlines the importance of policy innovations and regulatory changes in order for technologies to have a meaningful contribution to the transition to a circular plastic economy.

The study makes an important theoretical contribution by using empirical evidence from various African regions to articulate the critical importance of the regime dimension in accelerating the circular economy transition in general, and the circular plastic economy in particular, in Africa.

This paper aims to provide a more comprehensive look behind the China’s rapid ascent and influence across the African continent by exploring the Sino-African funding data at the project level while incorporating recipient nations’ economic characteristics of interest such as trade data and natural resources endowment.

Combining AidData’s project reported data with country bilateral exports and imports data and other pertinent African countries’ data, the authors are able to perform a cross-sectional interrogation of China’s finding motives and their impact on the continent. The results indicate that the China’s funding to Africa mostly goes to energy and transportation sectors, as expected, and the recipient country’s exports to China increase as the funding increases. However, the authors find that the impact of China’s financing on the bilateral trade flow is unbalanced because the recipient country’s imports from China are not found to be significant.

Interestingly, although the analysis confirms that oil is a key contributing factor in attracting China’s funding, the authors discover that there exists no positive relationship between the China funding amount and the recipient country’s general natural resource level. The results do not support the common notion that China is primarily interested in extracting natural resource deposits, aside from oil, from the host nation when they allocate their funding.

Overall, the paper supports the theoretical propositions of the new structural economics framework when it comes to the relationship between China’s funding and the recipient country’s characteristics.

This study aims to explore whether globalization and technology are harmful to health using a global panel data set of 52 countries over the period 1990–2019.

The study focused on four continents: Africa, the Americas, Asia/Oceania and Europe. The authors used four advanced econometric methodologies, which include the standard panel fixed effect (FE), Arellano–Bover/Blundell–Bond dynamic panel, Hausman–Taylor specification and two-stage least squares (FE-2SLS)/Lewbel-2SLS approaches.

The empirical evidence highlights the significance of globalization and technology in promoting global health. The findings suggest that globalization has various impacts on global health indicators and that technology is useful in tracking, monitoring and promoting global health. In addition, the empirical evidence indicates that a truly health-centred process of globalization and technological innovation can only be realized by ensuring that the interests of countries and vulnerable populations to health risks are adequately considered in international decision-making regarding global economic integration.

The authors suggest that achieving the aspiration of global health will entail the use of globalization and information technology to extend human activities and provide equal access to global health.

The purpose of this study is to draw a scientific map of the Grand Tours cycling as part of the growing research field in this field at the global level. This study also identifies the components of scientific production in this field along with their collaboration patterns.

With the aim of achieving a comprehensive and deep understanding of the studies related to the Grand Tour, this research aims to address the existing gaps and provide a comprehensive summary of these scholarly works. To achieve this goal, the authors used a systematic and scientometric combination method, analyzing studies from the past half century (1970–2022).

The research findings reveal that scientific studies related to cycling events exhibit a geographical concentration within the continent of Europe, surpassing other continents. Notably, Spain, the USA, the UK and Italy emerge as pioneers in this field of inquiry. The main themes identified in these studies encompass cycling, the Tour de France, performance, professional roa cycling, heart rate, endurance, doping and power output.

This research, along with other systematic studies, contributes to the existing literature in this field by providing both quantitative and qualitative data. Additionally, the study serves as a foundation for identifying active and influential countries, institutions and authors in this domain. Such insights are highly effective in establishing scientific focal points in this field.

This study, in conjunction with the introduction of key figures in mega cycling event research, sheds light on the thematic areas explored within these studies. Notably, it is the sole study that has illuminated hidden facets of this field using scientometric and systematic methods.

The present research attempts to delve into the climate-agriculture-migration nexus to ascertain whether the variation in agriculture output due to climatic factors has a significant influence on the emigration flows from the Asian and African continents.

The present study draws upon a rich panel of data from 27 countries (14 African and 13 Asian) between 1995 and 2020. The first stage least square, OLS and 2SLS techniques have been employed to examine the relationships between climatic factors and international migration, climatic factors and agriculture output, and agriculture output and international migration, respectively.

The results exhibit a positive relationship between temperature and international migration. The influence of temperature on agriculture output is negative but insignificant while precipitation promotes agriculture output. In addition, agriculture output negatively influences international migration, and these findings establish a climate-agriculture-migration relationship.

To counteract the climate-agriculture-migration nexus, it is incumbent upon governments to conduct extensive field trials and data collection exercises to assess the influence of climate in separate agro-ecological zones and devise policies accordingly.

The literature concerning the interrelationship between climatic factors, agriculture and migration is scarce and what is available pertains to different contexts. Moreover, no studies are based on Asia and Africa; the continents have a high dependence on agriculture and outmigration rates, and the present research covers this important gap in the literature.

This paper aims to examine the British Broadcasting Corporation’s (BBC) portrayal of the May 2022 Monkeypox outbreak in the West. The Monkeypox outbreak and the outcry from African journalists on some Western media outlets’ use of black people to portray the Monkeypox outbreak informed the present study to investigate, through empirical evidence, whether Western media portrays Africa negatively.

The paper opted for the content analysis method. The news recordings from BBC News analysed for this study were archived videos on Monkeypox retrieved from Blob of Broadcast, an on-demand audio and video streaming service in the UK.

Findings indicated that videos were the most used visuals by the BBC to depict the Monkeypox outbreak in the observed period. Findings also revealed that Black was the prevalent skin tone used in depicting those affected by the outbreak, while White was the prevalent skin tone used in depicting the scientists interviewed for their expert knowledge and at the forefront of the Monkeypox outbreak.

The paper includes implications for Western media outlets on how to portray Africa and its people.

This paper fulfils an identified need to investigate how Africa is portrayed in Western media through empirical evidence.

This study aims to provide an overview of the dimension of stored collections displayed in visible storage and to indicate the main factors which hinder their accessibility.

This study is based on quantitative analysis: a survey was conducted through the offices of International Council of Museums and direct invitations to 2,558 museums located worldwide.

The study estimated 32% on average the share of stored collections displayed in visible storage. The analysis provides a picture of how many stored items are made accessible in visible storage across the continents, according to the collection’s type and size and the museums’ legal status. In addition, several aspects of visible storage are investigated to highlight whether or not it truly enables museums to achieve accessibility of their stored collections and which factors might hinder the accessibility. Amid them, the foremost factors involve the inadequacy of resources, such as the lack of staff (71%) and poor budget (68%). Because of it, museums are prone to setting up offsite storage (37%), often 16 km far from the city centre, thereby questioning the concept of accessibility itself.

One major limitation of this study is that it does not consider people’s standpoints. Therefore, the author recommends that future studies focus on what people opine on visible storage, such as their appreciation of the display format, the behind-the-scenes, their need for interpretation and the degree of satisfaction with their information needs, as well as their perception of the size of stored collections.

These findings suggest that museums could take action in areas whereby the data demonstrated weaknesses in terms of accessibility. For instance, museums could set up a shuttle service or arrange public transportation service to allow people to visit offsite storage. Additionally, financial accessibility might be achieved by not charging some groups (elderly, students, etc.).

The topic of stored collections and their accessibility has crucial social implications because not displaying collections triggers inequality amid social groups of excluded people and a small elite.

This study focuses on visible storage as a possible solution to enhance the accessibility of collections and indicates to what extent visible storage provides this accessibility. On the contrary, previous research did not estimate how much visible storage impacts the accessibility of stored collections.

This study aims to highlight the many distinguishing characteristics of open-access repositories that archive “Patents” in the Directory of Open-Access Repositories (OpenDOAR) provided by Asian nations.

The OpenDOAR was chosen as a data collection tool that provides a quality-assured list of repositories indexed globally. The data was extracted on 28 March 2023.

The study found that only eight Asian countries contributed to open-access repositories on OpenDOAR, with China being the highest contributor. These countries mainly focused on institutional repositories, primarily using DSpace and English as the main language interface. Web 2.0 tools, especially RSS and Atom, were commonly used, along with some presence of social media platforms on the sites, although to a lesser extent. While many repositories followed the OAI-PMH protocol, a considerable portion did not adopt open-access policies.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first one that brings to light the different features of repositories archiving one of the important content types, i.e. “Patents” in the OpenDOAR by Asian countries.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of Islamic finance on women empowerment in Africa between the periods of 1975 and 2021.

This paper uses secondary data for 27 African countries obtained from the World Development Indicators, World Population Review and the Varieties of Democracy databases. Four dimensions of women empowerment, namely, economic, social, political and household, are considered while Islamic finance is proxied by a binary variable with 1 and 0 representing the presence and the absence of Islamic finance, respectively. The two-staged least square estimation technique is used to control for the problem of endogeneity.

This study revealed that Islamic finance positively affects women empowerment in Africa. Specifically, Islamic finance has positive and significant effects on women political empowerment, women economic empowerment and women social empowerment in Africa but nonsignificant effect on home empowerment. These effects are more pronounced in middle-income than in low-income countries and in countries with higher penetration rate of Islamic finance.

Policymakers should put in place the necessary mechanisms for the promotion of Islamic finance such as the enacting of laws that ensures the creation of full-fledged Islamic banks, encouraging research in Islamic finance and Islamic economics. These policies should equally be backed by the creation of some accompanying measures such as the abolition of social norms that limit women’s ability to take part in decision-making.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study involving an Africa continent-wide analysis of the effects of Islamic finance on women empowerment.