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The safety of operators handling pesticides is still one of the main problems facing Thai agricultural workers. The purpose of this paper is to study the safety of farmers and the techniques recommended to farmers by the Department of Agriculture in Thailand, i.e. spraying to achieve optimum spray volume with consideration for wind direction – henceforth referred to as officer techniques.

Operator exposure was detected by verifying the deposition of dye tracer on the coveralls worn by ten spray service team leaders, for all applications between May and June 2017. For each technique, a total of 15 patches were attached at the lower legs, thigh, chest, forearms, upper arms, hands, face, forehead and back. Each individual technique was performed four times in the area of 1,800 m².

The results showed that the deposits with the farmers’ techniques was much higher than with officers’ techniques ranging from 2.32 to 23.91 times at the tillering stage and 9.90 to 56.79 times at the booting stage, respectively. These results indicate that the spray application technique has a considerable potential for reducing the contamination of spray operators by 56.96–98.23 percent. Operator safety can be considerably improved by the spray application technique employed. Without any investment and changing equipment, only by considering wind direction, officers’ techniques could avoid much deposition, which is the most practical operation in the field. The boom sprayer as a novel recommended technique is an alternative giving a positive result and it can be a substitute for the conventional method. Furthermore, the authors must pay attention to personal protective equipment (PPE) because depositions were discovered on the whole of the bodies of those tested. PPE is the best way to protect an operator from pesticide contamination.

Operator exposure data can be helpful in further development of exposure models and databases for risk assessment and pesticide registration in Thailand.

The purpose of the paper is to test and analyze the equilibrium economic relationships of the East Africa Community (EAC).

To attain the study's purpose the authors applied the Johansen cointegration test, including long-run structural modeling (LRSM), vector-error-correlation-model (VECM) and variance-decomposition (VDC).

At I(1), both Philips‐Peron (PP) and Kwiatkowski–Phillips–Schmidt–Shin (KPSS) tests show that the East Africa member states' economies are cointegrated. The result was further substantiated by the tests based on Johansen cointegration and VECM procedures, showing significant long-run and short-run economic relations. The result further reveals that despite some uncommon issues among member states such as Tanzania and Kenya, however, their economic relationships remain significant though it is negative. Moreover, the finding revealed positive and significant short-run economic relationships between Kenya, Burundi and Rwanda.

The paper applies the cointegration techniques in the context of EAC. The result is likely to be adding value to the policymaker and also to the existing literature on the subject. This may trigger policy implications and open new research direction within the region and out.

The purpose is to detect the nonlinearity wholesale rice price formation process in Italy in the 1995–2017 period.

A nonlinear smooth transition autoregressive (STAR)-type dynamics model is used.

Wholesale rice prices are significantly affected by variations in the international price of rice as well as variations in Arborio price.

The limitations include policy recommendations for the production and commercialization of rice in Italy.

Understanding rice pricing dynamics and nonlinearity behavior is pivotal for the survival of the entire European and Italian rice supply chain.

In the extant literature, no evidence exists on non-linearity of rice prices in Italy.