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Natural calamities impair agricultural households' ability to invest in their farms. Facilitating access to agricultural credit may assist farmers in the face of negative revenue shocks. The aim of this study is to investigate the impact of agricultural credit on the agricultural input expenditure of disaster-affected farmers in Bangladesh.

The study utilizes data on 2,519 disaster-affected farming households from Bangladesh's Household Income and Expenditure Study (HIES) 2016–2017, which employs a nationwide representative five-year interval survey. Further, propensity score matching (PSM) identification strategy is used to estimate the average treatment effect on the treated (ATET), and Mahalanobis distance matching (MDM) is used for the robustness test. In addition, heterogeneous analysis has been conducted to explore the impact of agricultural credit on different types of farming households.

The findings reveal that access to agricultural credit has a favorable and significant effect on farm input expenditure for disaster-affected farmers. Therefore, agricultural credit accessibility could be utilized as a policy tool to assist disaster-affected farmers in improving their investment capacity, and hence, agricultural output.

This study, using a quasi-experimental design of access to agricultural credit on agricultural input expenditures of the disaster-affected farming households in coastal areas of Bangladesh to estimate the causal effect.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the trends and prospects for the development of the halal market for Italian foods, with a focus on pasta production as one of the most valued products of the Made in Italy brand. The analysis takes into consideration drivers and obstacles for developing halal orientation strategies in world and internal markets and opportunities and threats for Italian food firms.

Market dynamics were investigated by a forecasting tool, the Delphi method, which aims to explore future market trends and give suggestions for firm strategies and policy intervention. Besides firms, other experts involved in the Italian halal food sector were interviewed. Answers were organised according to the level of importance given to the different issues and to the level of agreement between the opinions of the experts. These findings were then discussed in relation to the contexts, both external and internal to companies, that had given rise to such opinions.

The halal food market represents a good opportunity for enlarging the overseas markets for Italian products and producers. Several external and internal factors related to the demographic, the institutional, the market and the firm contexts, emerged. The challenges that non-Islamic countries, markets and firms face in the adoption of halal strategies are mainly due to the institutional context, to the scarce awareness of halal principles and practices, and to some suspicion of Islamic food and culture that does not yet seem well-known and accepted on the domestic market.

The Islamic food market has still to be fully explored in Italy, this is despite strongly emerging demand and a growing number of firms showing interest in implementing halal certification and entering new Islamic markets. The paper findings contribute to the scarce empirical literature about the halal market in Italy and give some recommendations both for supporting further studies, identifying preliminary implications and suggesting policy measures.

In his review of notable planning disasters, Hall proposes two ways for avoiding future disasters. In a turbulent age, the improvement of forecasting methods is quite problematic. Ranking near and distant futures requires images of alternative future developments. This paper investigates the use of scenarios constructed through interactive knowledge in order to evaluate near‐future policies and programmes. However, since scenarios normally have long‐time horizons, there is a tenuous link between the ideas and aspirations outlined in alternative scenarios and near‐future policies and programmes. This implies that such scenarios can in the first place be used to assess preferences in the near future in relation to distant ideas and aspirations expressed in them. They may also help structure the context and its underlying plural values, and enlarge the range of possible criteria for evaluation. In this sense, they require that evaluation remains open to the discovery of societal preferences, interests and desires. For this purpose uses the concept “exploratory evaluation”. The latter hopefully provides a useful instrument in evaluation. While the emphasis in this paper is on the methodological implications of using long‐term scenarios to evaluate current choices, it nevertheless indicates how scenarios might be used in evaluating policies for sustainable development in southern Mediterranean cities: Tunis, Izmir and Rabat‐Casablanca.

Those who move among the people with their eyes open will not doubt that the number of non‐smokers is increasing, but mostly among older adults. Sales of cigarettes, despite the ban on advertising and the grim warning printed on packets, do not reflect this however, which can only mean that those who still smoke are the heavy smokers. This is a bad sign; as is the fact that youngsters, including a high percentage of those at school, openly flaunt the habit. The offence of using tobacco or any other smoking mixture or snuff while handling food or in any food room in which there is open food (Reg. 10(e)), remains one of the common causes of prosecutions under the Food Hygiene Regulations; it has not diminished over the years. The commonest offenders are men and especially those in the butchery trade, fishmongers and stall‐holders, but, here again, to those who move around, the habit seems fairely widespread. Parts of cigarettes continue to be a common finding especially in bread and flour confectionery, but also in fresh meat, indicating that an offence has been committed, and only a few of the offenders end up in court. Our purpose in returning to the subject of smoking, however, is not to relate it to food hygiene but to discuss measures of control being suggested by the Government now that advertising bans and printed health warnings have patently failed to achieve their object.

This study aims to examine the association between apprenticeship training and self-employment and how gender moderates the association.

Secondary data from the World Bank’s Skills Towards Employment and Productivity (STEP) survey on Ghana were analysed using a binary choice (logit regression) model. The STEP survey drew its nationally representative sample from the working-age population (15–64 years) in urban areas.

After controlling for several factors identified in the literature as determinants of self-employment, the results indicate that completing apprenticeship training increases the likelihood of being self-employed. However, women who have completed apprenticeship training are more likely to be self-employed than men.

By examining the moderating effect of gender on the association between apprenticeship training and self-employment, this study has offered new evidence that policymakers can use to promote self-employment, especially among women, to reduce the entrepreneurial gap between men and women.

This study aimed to examine and explain the role of knowledge sharing in shaping innovation culture to improve business performance and build sustainable competitive advantage. Most empirical research tended to be conducted in large companies, and there are limited studies on this topic in the SME sector. Thus, the study needs to re-examine whether the theories developed to understand large companies apply to SMEs.

This quantitative study involved 259 respondents from a 59 sampling frame consisting of three levels of management of export SMEs in the Bali province of Indonesia. The questionnaire used to gather the data used a semantic differential scale, and the data were analyzed using SmartPLS software.

The results showed that knowledge sharing significantly influenced innovation culture, business performance and sustainable competitive advantage. Theoretically, this research provides insight into the body of knowledge in innovation culture and business performance as a mediator variable.

Cross-sectional design limits the authors from drawing definitive generalizations, and self-reported measures used in the study increase the chances of bias.

The study's findings could motivate managers and practitioners to place emphasis on knowledge sharing and innovation culture in the SME sector.

The role of knowledge sharing has been focused on large companies in several countries. However, research examining the role of knowledge sharing in building an innovation culture is still rare in the SME sector, particularly in Indonesian SMEs. Therefore, research on this topic is needed because Indonesia has not only a different culture but also different business practices.

The purpose of this paper is to present a method and results of evaluating damaged building extraction using an object recognition task in pre‐ and post‐tsunami event. The advantage of remote sensing and its applications made it possible to extract damaged building images and vulnerability easement of wide urban areas due to natural disasters.

The proposed approach involves several advanced morphological operators, among which are adaptive transforms with varying size, shape and grey level of the structuring elements. IKONOS‐2 satellite images consisting of pre‐ and post‐2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami site of the Kalmunai area on the East coast of Sri Lanka were used. Morphological operation using structural element are applied for segmented images, then extracted remaining building foot print using random forest classification method. This work extended further the road lines extraction using Hough transform.

The result was investigated using geographic information system (GIS) data and global positioning system (GPS) ground survey in the field and it appeared to have high accuracy: the confidence measures produced of a completely destroyed structure give 86 percent by object‐based, respectively, after the tsunami in one segment of Maruthamune GN Division.

This study has also identified significant limitations, due to the resolution and clearness of satellite images and vegetation canopy over the building footprint.

The authors develop an automated method to detect damaged buildings and compare the results with GIS‐based ground survey.

Palm oil is widely used in the food industry; however, there are two main controversies connected to its use, namely, its nutritional value and the environmental consequences deriving from its crop. In Italy, the use of palm oil has recently been criticized, insomuch that some important bakery companies decided to substitute it, creating a real food marketing case. Through a focus on biscuits, this study is aimed at profiling consumers with regard to palm oil issue to better comprehend if the presence of this ingredient truly influences their food purchases and if they care about the nutritional and environmental aspects, highlighting the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on consumers' consumption.

A questionnaire was administered to 243 subjects in Italy, in order to apply a cluster analysis.

The findings show the presence of three main kinds of consumers: (1) compromise finders (sensitive to cost savings but trying to privilege palm-oil free food), (2) brand-loyal consumers (palm oil does not influence their preferences) and (3) healthsensitives (the presence of palm oil profoundly affects their choices), who represent the majority of our sample. The results and implications are discussed.

Research on palm oil is essentially focused on chemistry, natural sciences or on its industrial uses: this study analyzes the consumer point of view by applying a different methodology compared to existing studies.

Developing a reliable cost estimate at the early stage of construction projects is challenging due to inadequate project information. Most of the information during this stage is qualitative, posing additional challenges to achieving accurate cost estimates. Additionally, there is a lack of tools that use qualitative project information and forecast the budgets required for project completion. This research, therefore, aims to develop a model for setting project budgets (excluding land) during the pre-conceptual stage of residential buildings, where project information is mainly qualitative.

Due to the qualitative nature of project information at the pre-conception stage, a natural language processing model, DistilBERT (Distilled Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers), was trained to predict the cost range of residential buildings at the pre-conception stage. The training and evaluation data included 63,899 building permit activity records (2021–2022) from the Victorian State Building Authority, Australia. The input data comprised the project description of each record, which included project location and basic material types (floor, frame, roofing, and external wall).

This research designed a novel tool for predicting the project budget based on preliminary project information. The model achieved 79% accuracy in classifying residential buildings into three cost_classes ($100,000-$300,000, $300,000-$500,000, $500,000-$1,200,000) and F1-scores of 0.85, 0.73, and 0.74, respectively. Additionally, the results show that the model learnt the contextual relationship between qualitative data like project location and cost.

The current model was developed using data from Victoria state in Australia; hence, it would not return relevant outcomes for other contexts. However, future studies can adopt the methods to develop similar models for their context.

This research is the first to leverage a deep learning model, DistilBERT, for cost estimation at the pre-conception stage using basic project information like location and material types. Therefore, the model would contribute to overcoming data limitations for cost estimation at the pre-conception stage. Residential building stakeholders, like clients, designers, and estimators, can use the model to forecast the project budget at the pre-conception stage to facilitate decision-making.

Management writings in the Middle East region are scarce and scattered. This is due to the lack of doctorate programmes offered by educational institutions, the weak links between academia and the business world, limited formal and informal networks, the lack of status given to the field of management by national bodies and the lack of a publication culture. A bibliography of management‐related writings in the Middle East is presented, which includes other functional areas such as marketing, finance and accounting. It aims to draw the students' attention to a variety of sources. In compiling the bibliography a review of the literature in Arabic, English and Turkish was undertaken, followed by a survey of the top officials of academic institutions offering management/commerce, business administration degree programmes in the region.