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Women’s empowerment remains a key development challenge in Kenya. The purpose of this study is to attempt to understand the status of women’s empowerment and the key contributors to their disempowerment in Kenya’s aquaculture sector.

A cross-sectional survey was conducted on 534 male and female fish farmers from 300 households drawn from six counties in Kenya (Kakamega, Kisumu, Kisii, Kiambu, Meru and Nyeri). The Abbreviated Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (A-WEAI) was adapted to Abbreviated Women’s Empowerment in Fisheries and Aquaculture Index (A-WEFI) to suit the aquaculture and fisheries sub-sector. The adapted A-WEFI was then used to estimate and the status of women’s and men’s using five domains of empowerment (5DE) and a gender parity index (GPI). Data were analysed using descriptive statistics, Cramer’s V and sensitivity analysis as test statistics.

About 86% of the men and 80% of the women were classified as empowered. The mean score of the 5DE was 0.93 and 0.95 for women and men, respectively. In addition, 82% of the households achieved gender parity, suggesting that for such households, empowerment of men was no greater than that of women. Overall, the results suggest no major differences between the empowerment of women and men. Findings suggest areas of improvement in empowerment: when observed separately, women report lack of agency in production, resource, time-use and allocation and leadership.

This paper adapts the A-WEAI to the fisheries and aquaculture context, in bid to bridge the gap in standard women’s empowerment measurement methods in this area. Also, there are limited empirical studies on the multifaceted empowerment of women in aquaculture in Kenya. The findings are meant to serve as a point of reference for policymakers, as they develop gender-responsive intervention programmes, and in implementing gender mainstreaming in Kenya.

Develop a comprehensive framework for assessing the knowledge organization systems (KOSs), including the taxonomy of Wikipedia and the ontologies of Wikidata, with a specific focus on enhancing management and retrieval with a gender nonbinary perspective.

This study employs heuristic and inspection methods to assess Wikipedia’s KOS, ensuring compliance with international standards. It evaluates the efficiency of retrieving non-masculine gender-related articles using the Catalan Wikipedian category scheme, identifying limitations. Additionally, a novel assessment of Wikidata ontologies examines their structure and coverage of gender-related properties, comparing them to Wikipedia’s taxonomy for advantages and enhancements.

This study evaluates Wikipedia’s taxonomy and Wikidata’s ontologies, establishing evaluation criteria for gender-based categorization and exploring their structural effectiveness. The evaluation process suggests that Wikidata ontologies may offer a viable solution to address Wikipedia’s categorization challenges.

The assessment of Wikipedia categories (taxonomy) based on KOS standards leads to the conclusion that there is ample room for improvement, not only in matters concerning gender identity but also in the overall KOS to enhance search and retrieval for users. These findings bear relevance for the design of tools to support information retrieval on knowledge-rich websites, as they assist users in exploring topics and concepts.

The aim of this chapter is to draw attention to the changes that have taken place in Czechia in the last 20 years in the field of foreign trade, focussing on the key milestones of 2002, 2012 and 2022. The chapter also explains the important link between the performance of foreign trade and economic growth; this link has its support in theory, and above all in empiricism. The importance of foreign trade for economic growth is key, especially from the point of view of changes in the territorial and commodity structure, which saw several important changes in the observed period 2002–2022, so we can relevantly explain the effects on the economic growth of Czechia. However, the chapter finds a connection with yet another economic category, which is competitiveness. The method of measuring and subsequent ranking of competitiveness is also of utmost importance. If the economy is to be competitive, it must have its own strategy, and this directly concerns the key instruments of pro-export policy.

The direction of the causality relationship between Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and economic growth is a highly controversial issue in the literature. There are two basic approaches advocating different causal directions between FDI and growth, which are called hypotheses of FDI-led Growth and Growth-led FDI. The aim of this study is to analyze the causality relationship between FDI and economic growth in RCEP countries and thus make a new contribution to the discussions in the relevant literature. In addition, the results of the study are expected to provide important implications for the policies to be designed for economic growth based on FDI flows to RCEP countries. Thus, by examining the direction of causality between FDI and economic growth in RCEP countries, we aim to provide a new contribution to related literature and make some implications for the policy design process of economic growth in the RCEP area.

We empirically examined the direction of a causal link between FDI and economic growth in the context of Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RPEC) countries in order to test the hypothesis of FDI-led growth and Growth-led FDI. Accordingly, as our main variables of interest, we incorporated the inward foreign direct investment stock to gross domestic product ratio (FDI) and gross domestic product per capita (GDP). Hatemi-J (2012) asymmetric causality test has been employed in the investigation of the direction of causality between FDI and GDP over the period of 1980–2020. Thus, unlike most of the studies investigating the direction of causality between FDI and growth using the linear causality analysis method, our study performed a nonlinear causality analysis.

Empirical results reveal that the causal relationship between FDI and national income in RPEC countries is non-linear or asymmetric . The results of the symmetric causality test for both from FDI to national income and from national income to FDI are statistically insignificant for all countries. Therefore, this finding obtained from the study provided an important guide to the econometric methods to be used in other studies to be conducted in the same region in the future. Concerning the asymmetric causality relationship from FDI to growth, positive FDI shocks are an important cause of national income in most RCEP countries. However, the effect of negative FDI shocks on national income is quite weak compared to positive shocks. Regarding the asymmetric causality relationship from growth to FDI, positive national income shocks do not create a significant causal relationship with FDI. Similarly, the effects of negative national income shocks on FDI are statistically insignificant. Overall, asymmetric causality test results reveal that positive FDI shocks have an important causal impact on economic growth in most RCEP countries. Thus, the results of econometric analysis mostly support the argument that the FDI-led growth hypothesis rather than the Growth-led FDI hypothesis in RCEP countries. Accordingly, policy-makers in most of the RCEP countries should continue to provide more incentives and facilities to multinational companies in order to ensure constant economic growth.

Our study brings a significant difference in the econometric method used compared to most of the other studies in the literature. Existing empirical studies on the direction of causality between FDI and growth mostly use standard Granger-linear causality-type tests to detect the direction of causality among FDI and growth. Unlike most of the studies in the literature, our study adopted a different methodological approach, namely the Hatemi J test to detect the non-linear causality between FDI and economic growth in RCEP countries. Therefore, this paper made a new methodological contribution significantly to the literature focusing on the causal relationship between FDI and economic growth by using a non-linear causality method rather than a linear causality one.

Despite the longstanding male dominance in the socio-politico-economic spheres, recent decades have witnessed remarkable improvements in gender inclusion. Although the issue of gender inclusion has been widely documented, answers to the question of whether institutional arrangements and information technology shape gender inclusion remain contentious. This study, therefore, empirically examines the effects of institutional quality and ICT penetration on gender inclusion on a global scale.

To control for the endogeneity of modeled variables and cross-sectional dependence inherent with large panel datasets, the study employs the Driscoll-Kraay Fixed Effects (DKFE) and the system Generalised Method of Moments (GMM) estimators for a panel of 142 countries from 1996 to 2020.

The empirical findings from the DKFE and system GMM estimators reveal that strong institutions significantly enhance gender inclusion. Moreover, by disaggregating institutional quality into various governance indicators, we show that besides corruption control, which has a positive but insignificant effect on women’s empowerment, other governance indicators significantly enhance gender inclusion. Furthermore, there is evidence that various ICT measures promote gender inclusion.

The study results suggest that policymakers in developing countries should implement stringent measures to curb corruption. Moreover, policymakers in low-income countries should create avenues to facilitate women’s access to ICTs. Hence, policymakers in low-income countries should create and equip ICT training centers and render them accessible to all categories of women. Furthermore, developed countries with high-tech knowledge could help developing countries by organizing free training workshops and sensitization campaigns concerning the use of ICTs vis-à-vis women empowerment in various fields of life.

The present study fills a significant research gap by comprehensively exploring the nexuses between governance, ICT penetration, and the socio-politico-economic dimensions of gender inclusion from a global perspective. Besides the paucity of studies in this regard, the few existing studies have either been focused on region and country-specific case studies in developed or developing economies. Moreover, this study is timely, given the importance placed on gender inclusion (SDG5), quality of institutions (SDG16), and ICT penetration (SDG9) in the 2015–2030 global development agenda.

The objective of the proposed work is to identify the most commonly occurring non–small cell carcinoma types, such as adenocarcinoma and squamous cell carcinoma, within the human population. Another objective of the work is to reduce the false positive rate during the classification.

In this work, a hybrid method using convolutional neural networks (CNNs), extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) and long-short-term memory networks (LSTMs) has been proposed to distinguish between lung adenocarcinoma and squamous cell carcinoma. To extract features from non–small cell lung carcinoma images, a three-layer convolution and three-layer max-pooling-based CNN is used. A few important features have been selected from the extracted features using the XGBoost algorithm as the optimal feature. Finally, LSTM has been used for the classification of carcinoma types. The accuracy of the proposed method is 99.57 per cent, and the false positive rate is 0.427 per cent.

The proposed CNN–XGBoost–LSTM hybrid method has significantly improved the results in distinguishing between adenocarcinoma and squamous cell carcinoma. The importance of the method can be outlined as follows: It has a very low false positive rate of 0.427 per cent. It has very high accuracy, i.e. 99.57 per cent. CNN-based features are providing accurate results in classifying lung carcinoma. It has the potential to serve as an assisting aid for doctors.

It can be used by doctors as a secondary tool for the analysis of non–small cell lung cancers.

It can help rural doctors by sending the patients to specialized doctors for more analysis of lung cancer.

In this work, a hybrid method using CNN, XGBoost and LSTM has been proposed to distinguish between lung adenocarcinoma and squamous cell carcinoma. A three-layer convolution and three-layer max-pooling-based CNN is used to extract features from the non–small cell lung carcinoma images. A few important features have been selected from the extracted features using the XGBoost algorithm as the optimal feature. Finally, LSTM has been used for the classification of carcinoma types.

This paper aims to introduce the concept of Entrepreneurial Collective Intelligence (ECI) as a means of understanding how communities of entrepreneurial actors learn to act both collectively and knowingly. It explores how connections between processes of CI, agency and action can explain and enable the development entrepreneurial community organisations.

There is a selective literature review of prior works on the related fields of community and collective entrepreneurship; collectives and intelligence; agency and action. The review is used to propose a framework of collective entrepreneurial intelligence, agency and action. An interpretive approach is used to research four case studies of community organisations which use CI to generate entrepreneurial outcomes.

The cases are compared with themes from prior literature to develop a conceptual model of four ECI processes which enable intelligence, agency and action: collaborative processes; distributed working; intelligence representations and organisation of infrastructures. These are theorised to discuss ideas, challenges, methods and questions to enhance entrepreneurial actions, based on sharing knowledge and learning, in the context of collective agency, action and intelligence.

The four processes, both together and separately, represent a coherent framework useful for further studies on the role of collectives in enterprising communities.

The four processes each represent a central area of attention, not only for development, learning, decision-making and leadership within enterprising communities but also for entrepreneurship education in terms of alternative didactics, pedagogies and learning forms.

The improved knowledge on the role of collective agency and CI within entrepreneurial processes is useful for strengthening civil activism and other fruitful forms of entrepreneurial collective processes. This may help solve complicated societal problems where traditional conceptions of entrepreneurship fail.

The conceptual contribution is to explain the dynamic relationships between ECI and action, mediated by collective agency. The role of CI in informing entrepreneurial communities is explored and four enabling processes are proposed. This coherent framework is useful for further studies on the role of collectives in enterprising communities, whilst informing their learning, decision-making and leadership.

This paper delves into the critical role of women in the domains of architecture, engineering, construction and urban planning, particularly within the context of the United Nations sustainable development goals (SDGs) and the imperative of achieving gender parity. Concentrating on the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, this paper explores the profound importance of women as essential contributors to urbanisation and sustainable development. It scrutinizes the existing gender disparities within the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industries; evaluates prevailing women empowerment indices in diverse sectors; and presents a strategic framework for harnessing women’s engagement to cultivate inclusive and sustainable urban cultures in the GCC. This conceptual paper introduces an actionable framework that can serve as a guiding agenda for empowering women in the AEC sectors by incorporating their socio-cultural, economic and ecological contributions towards creating sustainable cities.

Centring its focus on Gulf Cities, this paper employs a comprehensive approach to examine the current gender disparities within the architecture, engineering and construction sectors. It probes potential barriers and advocates for leveraging women’s participation to foster inclusive and sustainable urban development in the GCC. The study introduces the Women’s Empowerment Index (WEI) for the Gulf AEC industry elucidating how these measures are translated into a tailored framework.

The paper presents a practical framework that provides actionable guidance for engaging various stakeholders, including governments, academia and industry players, to empower women within the AEC industries. An “Agenda for equitable AEC industries for sustainable urban development: Our Common Gulf Cities” is culminated in a Women Empowerment Index for the AEC Industry (WEI-AEC) designed to serve as a guidance tool to monitor progress within industry, governments and academia.

Future research endeavours could advance the framework by conducting institutional support analyses, multi-stakeholder collaboration studies and practical testing of the framework within real-world scenarios.

The findings of this study can guide and influence a diverse range of initiatives, including policy development, educational strategies, corporate endeavours, awareness campaigns, capacity-building programs, skill enhancement initiatives and knowledge exchange among the Gulf Cooperation Council countries.

This conceptual paper introduces a practical framework that can serve as a roadmap for implementing the study’s potential to shape policies, educational programs and corporate initiatives aimed at advancing both gender equality and the development of sustainable cities.