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Human development encompasses not only income, other factors of life such as education and health are equally important. Investments in education and health positively impact the development of any region. Therefore, development in general and human development in particular of a region highlights not only the application of income but also the (actual) living conditions of people. It should also focus on the living conditions of women. This can somehow be assessed by looking at the Gender Development Index (GDI), introduced by the UNDP in 1995 as the intital Human Development Index (HDI) did not address gender-related issues. The present study thus tries to examine gender inequality in terms of education and health in the North Bengal region as it can have adverse effects on the overall development in the region. The study relies on the available secondary data on education and health. It is imperative that we realize the need to narrow the gender gap for development to be inclusive as investing in women's education and health can contribute to holistic economic growth and development.

Women entrepreneurship is designated as the new engines of economic growth in developing countries. Prior research shows how men and women differ in starting a business, with women normally facing more restrictions on entrepreneurial financing, entrepreneurial growth, and entrepreneurial performance. This has often been explained by gender role, yet we still lack a systematic understanding of how gender roles impact on women's entrepreneurial process in developing countries. In this chapter, we review literatures on female entrepreneurship in developing countries to show how gender role works in developing countries and especially its influence on the intention/entry/business participation and performance of female entrepreneurs.

The authors propose the information matrix test to assess the constancy of mean and variance parameters in vector autoregressions (VAR). They additively decompose it into several orthogonal components: conditional heteroskedasticity and asymmetry of the innovations, and their unconditional skewness and kurtosis. Their Monte Carlo simulations explore both its finite size properties and its power against i.i.d. coefficients, persistent but stationary ones, and regime switching. Their procedures detect variation in the autoregressive coefficients and residual covariance matrix of a VAR for the US GDP growth rate and the statistical discrepancy, but they fail to detect any covariation between those two sets of coefficients.

Theories of the family are outlined and related to the socioeconomic deprivation of females and children giving Indian illustrations. The importance of Sen’s entitlement approach is critically discussed in this context. Although international bodies, such as the UNDP, recognise the importance of gender issues in development, UNDP’s Gender Development Index is found to be a poor indicator of female and family welfare. The question is then investigated of how women and children are faring under structural adjustment policies and in transition. Structural adjustment policies have increased the incidence of poverty among women and children in subsistence contexts and in some former centrally planned economies. Furthermore, disadvantaged wives and children are at increasing risk of falling through social safety nets as the welfare state continues to be dismantled in western economies. Changed social welfare regimes reduce opportunities for disadvantaged children. Unfortunately, many neo‐liberals continue to approach welfare services purely from the cost side and fail to see that the supply of social welfare services can raise productivity and promote social justice. Economists should not avoid discussions of social justice.

This chapter discusses the positioning of Belarus in the international context of socioeconomic development based on an assessment of the country's dynamics in world rankings. The country's presence in the recognized world rankings and its holding high positions in them is an obvious advantage for achieving a favorable investment image. Ratings characterize the country's comparative position at the international level in a number of areas: from credit capacity to human capital development.

There has been analyzed the position of the Republic of Belarus in several recognized international comparisons, such as Human Development Index, Doing Business, ICT Development Index, Global Innovation Index, Sustainable Development Goals Index, Corruption Perceptions Index, Rule of Law Index, Worldwide Governance Indicators, and others.

However, Belarus is not yet participating in the international competitiveness assessment through such popular international ratings as Global Competitiveness Index and Global Entrepreneurship Monitor. The research findings show that the strongest aspects of the socioeconomic development of Belarus are in place due to the high educational level of the human capital development, gender equality, and the implementation of the UN sustainable development goals. The analysis also shows that the weaknesses of institutional environment and public administration do not enable the full implementation of the planned goals of socioeconomic development.

This paper investigates the impact of trade liberalization measured by trade openness (OPN) and tariffs on women empowerment measured by the gender gap index and gender development index, for two groups of Arab countries divided based on their income levels using annual data for the period 1995–2020. The study also considers other factors that may influence the gender gap, such as GDP growth and the female unemployment rate. The purpose of this paper is to address these issues and explorers whether the effects of trade liberalization differ based on the countries' income levels.

This study employs the fully modified ordinary least squares (FM-OLS) regression model for heterogeneous cointegrated panels to examine the impact of trade liberalization on women empowerment. The study constructs an empirical two regression model of women empowerment measured by the gender gap model and gender development model for the two groups of higher-income countries and lower and middle-income countries.

The authors’ findings reveal that the impact of OPN on the gender gap varies between the two groups of Arab countries where more OPN within the higher-income group may increase the gender disparity, while it may reduce disparity within the lower and middle-income countries. In addition, GDP growth may reduce the gender disparity, while female unemployment raises the gender disparity between the two groups of countries in the long run. Findings also reveal that more OPN, tariffs and female unemployment may reduce gender development within the two groups, but more GDP growth may support the gender development in the long run.

This paper not only assesses the impact of trade liberalization on women empowerment generally, but also assess the women empowerment via two indices that are the gender gap and gender development in Arab countries which is – to the knowledge of the researchers – not yet investigated; further it explores if the effects of trade liberalization differs based on the countries' income levels.

Housing prices in Sydney have increased rapidly in the past three decades. This leads to a debate of whether Sydney housing prices have departed from macroeconomic fundamentals. However, little research has been devoted to this area. Therefore, this study aims to fill this gap by examining the long-run association between housing prices and market fundamentals. Further, it also examines the long-run determinants of housing prices in Greater Sydney.

The analysis of this study involves two stages. The first stage is to estimate the presence of long-run relationship between housing prices and market fundamentals with the Johansen and Juselius Cointegration test. Thereafter, the determinants of housing prices in Greater Sydney is assessed by using a vector error correction model.

The empirical results show that Sydney housing prices are cointegrated with market fundamentals in the long run. In addition, there is evidence to suggest that market fundamentals such as gross disposable income, housing supply, unemployment rate and gross domestic product are the key long-run determinants of Sydney housing prices, reflecting that Sydney housing prices, in general, can be explained by market fundamentals in the long run.

The findings enable more informed and practical policy and investment decision-making regarding the relation between housing prices and market fundamentals.

This paper is the first study to offer empirical evidence of the degree to which the behaviour of housing prices can be explained by market fundamentals, from a capital city instead of at a national level, using a relatively disaggregated dataset of housing price series for Greater Sydney.

For many retailers, research is something they undertake because they have a vague feeling they ought to do so, rather than because they anticipate any concrete benefits. It is the kind of attitude which prompted large retail organisations, years ago when the magic of electronic data processing first appeared on the horizon, to order expensive computers and then use them for paying wages. In this paper Dr Thorpe outlines the ‘external’ areas from which retailers might be expected to benefit from research, such as site selection and logistics of supply, and then of the ‘internal’ areas — merchandising and labour management. This is a summarised version of a paper read at the GDI conference at Zurich.

The purpose of this paper is to study the workspace and dexterity of a microhexapod which is a 6-degrees of freedom (DOF) parallel compliant manipulator, and also to investigate its dimensional synthesis to maximize the workspace and the global dexterity index at the same time. Microassembly is so essential in the current industry for manufacturing complicated structures. Most of the micromanipulators suffer from their restricted workspace because of using flexure joints compared to the conventional ones. In addition, the controllability of micromanipulators inside the whole workspace is very vital. Thus, it is very important to select the design parameters in a way that not only maximize the workspace but also its global dexterity index.

Microassembly is so essential in the current industry for manufacturing complicated structures. Most of the micromanipulators suffer from their restricted workspace because of using flexure joints compared to the conventional ones. In addition, the controllability of micromanipulators inside the whole workspace is very vital. Thus, it is very important to select the design parameters in a way that not only maximize the workspace but also its global dexterity index.

It has been shown that the proposed procedure for the workspace calculation can considerably speed the required calculations. The optimization results show that a converged-diverged configuration of pods and an increase in the difference between the moving and the stationary platforms’ radii cause the global dexterity index to increase and the workspace to decrease.

The proposed algorithm for the workspace analysis is very important, especially when it is an objective function of an optimization problem based on the search method. In addition, using screw theory can simply construct the homogeneous Jacobian matrix. The proposed methodology can be used for any other micromanipulator.