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This paper aims to investigate the use of smartphones for academic purposes by students at Dhaka University, the top-ranked university in Bangladesh.

Students currently using smartphones answered a questionnaire survey, which focused on whether or not students used smartphones for academic works and, if so, for what purposes they used them and their opinion on the advantages of using smartphones for academic purposes. Descriptive statistics were used to analyze demographic and academic characteristics of the students in relation to their smartphone usage. Non-parametric analyses were performed using Mann–Whitney and Kruskal–Wallis tests to compare between students’ demographic and academic variables and their opinion on the advantages of academic use of smartphones.

The findings indicate that a vast majority of university students used smartphones for academic purposes. They, on average and across the board, had a positive perception toward academic use of smartphones. Although there were some differences in terms of gender, age, place of origin and duration of smartphone use, these differences were largely due to fact that a smartphone is a relatively new addition to the life of most students who participated in this study.

Research investigating the academic use of smartphones in the perspective of developing countries is virtually non-existent. This is the first time an effort has been made to examine the use of smartphones by a large sample of university students in Bangladesh.

The economic development of Bangladesh is heavily reliant on the banking industry, yet it faces numerous hurdles, including liquidity issues, capital shortages, non-performing loans, inefficiencies and so on. Therefore, this study investigated the performance and efficiency of scheduled banks (state-owned, private commercial, foreign commercial and specialized banks) operating in Bangladesh.

The research was conducted using secondary data from annual reports of banks. The CAMELS rating system and Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) methods were employed to measure the performance and efficiency of banks, respectively.

In the overall bank rankings, results revealed that foreign commercial Standard Chartered Bank and state-owned Sonali Bank Limited came in first and last position, respectively. Among the four categories of banks, foreign commercial banks were the best performer, while state-owned banks were the worst. Only two banks, i.e. Citibank NA and HSBC Bank, were scale efficient while the remaining banks were inefficient. In terms of performance and efficiency, state-owned and specialized banks were deemed wanting.

This study proposes recommendations to the policymakers that could lead to more effective tactics for improving the banking industry's performance and efficiency.

As far as the authors are concerned, this study presents empirical evidence on the performance and efficiency of different types of banks and explores comparisons among them, which has never been done to this extent in the country before.

The study aims to empirically examine the relationship between monetary policy and economic growth, as well as to explore the long-run and the short-run effect of monetary policy on the economic growth of a developing country (Bangladesh) and a developed country (the United Kingdom).

Depending on data availability, the study employed secondary data covering the period of 1980–2019. The augmented Dickey–Fuller test and the Phillips–Perron test were used for the stationarity test. Further, the F-bounds test was run to justify the long-run relationship between monetary policy and economic growth. Thereafter, long-run coefficients were revealed from the auto-regressive distributed lag (ARDL) model and short-run coefficients from the error correction model. Furthermore, the vector error correction model (VECM) Granger causality approach was employed to demonstrate the causality of studied variables. Lastly, different diagnostics tests ensured the robustness of the models.

F-bounds test outcomes suggest that monetary policy has a long-run relationship with economic growth in both countries. Long-run coefficients revealed that money supply has a positive long-run impact on economic growth in both countries. Unlike the UK, the exchange rate exhibits an adverse effect on the economic growth of Bangladesh. The bank rate seems to promote economic growth for the UK. Findings also depict that increase in lending interest rates hurts the economic growth for both countries. Besides, the short-run coefficients portray random effects at different lags in both cases. Lastly, causality among studied variables is revealed using the VECM Granger causality approach.

The novelty of this study lies in consideration of both developing and developed countries in the same study.

To identify the financial stress and associate factors of tertiary level student.

To identify the financial stress and associate factors, a structured questionnaire was developed to collect data from 571 students of different universities of Bangladesh through Google form. Chi square and Cramer's V were applied to find the associated factors with financial stress of students, whereas ordinal regression was performed to evaluate the influence of the associated factors on financial stress.

Gender, living status, borrowing loan factors have positive association with financial stress. Tuition fee dues have significant positive association with financial stress. A student who has tuition fee dues feels 1.48 times more stress compared to student who does not have dues. Females were found less likely to be financially stressed (AOR = 1.536) than male students. Students who borrowed loans were more likely to have financial stress than non-borrowed loan groups of students.

Results indicate that financial stress has a strong impact on participation in different academic and personal activities of a student. Therefore, parents, university administration and student counselor should consider the factor to assess stress of a student.

This study identified factors responsible for financial stress of Bangladeshi students of tertiary level.

Although wearable health-monitoring technology (WHMT) has become a stimulus for public health, women’s acceptance rate of this technology appears to be low. Thus, this study intends to investigate the factors affecting women’s adoption of WHMT.

The unified theory of acceptance and use of technology–2 model has been used in this study as a research framework that has been extended to include lifestyle and attitude. The proposed extended framework is validated using primary data (n = 314) collected from female respondents using a structured questionnaire; the partial least square-based structural equation modeling technique is subsequently used to test the proposed hypothesis.

The results show that effort expectancy, social influence, price value, habit, attitude and lifestyle have significant positive effects on women’s behavioral intention to use WHMT and accelerate actual usage behavior. Notably, effort expectancy and habit exhibit the largest impact on behavioral intention. However, performance expectancy, facilitating conditions and hedonic motivation are not significantly associated with behavioral intentions.

The findings of this study are important for healthcare practitioners and service providers to comprehensively understand the factors that affect women’s behavioral intentions in line with their actual usage behavior. This insight will help policymakers design viable strategies regarding WHMT to promote its sustainable usage in least developed countries.

This study contributes novelty by using an extended model that links women’s attitudes and lifestyles to their adoption of WHMT. This study also fills the gaps in the existing literature on women’s behavioral intentions in the context of WHMT by showing novel associations in the domain of WHMT uptake.

The purpose of this study is to measure the perceptions and use of cloud services by the students of the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh. The specific objective of this study is to know what perceptions students have about cloud services, why and how they use cloud for academic activities.

For understanding the use of cloud services among the students of Dhaka University, a quantitative survey was carried out to collect data. Printed questionnaires were distributed among the students in different departments and university library. Both open- and close-ended questions were included in the questionnaire. A total of 329 students responded in this survey and the response rate was 85.5%. The collected data were analyzed using Statistical Package for the Social Sciences.

Findings revealed that students are generally aware of cloud services and majority of the respondents use cloud for different purposes. Students used cloud for storage, back up and collaboration purposes and some of Google features are widely used by majority of the students for academic purposes.

To the best of authors’ knowledge, this is the first time an effort has been made to measure the use of cloud services among the students of University of Dhaka. This study will help to raise cloud service awareness among the students and encourage the authorities to adopt appropriate strategies and policies to resolve cloud adoption in university setting. Specially, Center of Excellence in Teaching and Learning of Dhaka University can take some initiatives in this case.

While the usage of mobile financial services (MFSs) is increasing rapidly in developing countries, research on users' attitudes and behavioral intention to adopt MFS is limited. Thus, this study aims to investigate customers' attitudes and intentions to adopt MFS from a Bangladeshi perspective.

A mixed research design was employed to conduct this study. Data of 196 respondents were analyzed using partial least squares (PLS) path modeling. For the quantitative part, data collection was conducted using non-probability sampling through a structured survey questionnaire. A focus group discussion with ten MFS users from divergent backgrounds was conducted to validate the quantitative findings.

This paper integrated both the technology acceptance model (TAM) and innovation resistance theory (IRT) to validate the results. The authors found that perceived usefulness (PU), perceived ease of use (PEOU) and perceived trust (PT) positively contribute to customers' attitudes toward MFS adoption. Besides, barriers to acceptance had unfavorable effects on users' attitudes and usage intentions. Furthermore, a focus group discussion revealed valuable insights on the constructs used in this study.

The study results have implications for both MFS providers and researchers. The outputs and recommendations presented in this paper will encourage the MFS practitioners to stimulate users' attitudes and behavioral intentions by ensuring useful, easy to use, credible and risk-free mobile payment platforms.

This is one of the very few studies in Bangladesh that have taken a contemporary and emerging research topic, providing theoretical, methodological and practical contributions regarding the determinants and consequences of attitude toward using MFSs.

This study aims to provide new insights into the relationship between individual characteristics, particularly personality traits and mature students' intention to use (ITU) mobile learning (m-learning).

The research model was constructed by integrating the Big Five personality traits into the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) model. The data were collected from mature students at a university research center in Macau. Partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) was used to analyze the data and test the proposed hypotheses.

The results reveal that personality traits play a significant role in determining mature students' ITU m-learning technology. In particular, social influence (SI) mediates the relationship between agreeableness (AGB) and ITU.

This study examines how personality traits collectively influence mature students' receptiveness and intentions toward m-learning. As mature learners' motivations and preferences remain underexplored, insights into trait-technology links could address current gaps and optimize mobile educational support tailored to their distinct characteristics and needs.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between poverty and technical efficiency (TE) of paddy farmers in presence of their heterogeneous selling behaviours. This paper explains how such behavioural heterogeneity affects this relationship in south-western Bangladesh.

Translog production frontier model was used to estimate TE since it fitted the data set better. On the other hand, poverty indices were constructed by using P-α method. Then, multinomial logit models examined the existence of heterogeneous selling behaviours. It revealed adequate evidences in favour of behavioural heterogeneity. Finally, the authors employed a series of two stage instrumental variable regression models to relate poverty and TE with and without considering the behavioural heterogeneity.

The study finds that around 18, 39 and 44 per cent of households exhibit autarkic, non-wholesaling and wholesaling behaviour, respectively. Market failure due to transaction cost and credit constraints leads to emergence of such heterogeneity. Across these heterogeneous behaviours, impact of improving TE on poverty status significantly differs. Without controlling behavioural heterogeneity, TE significantly improves the poverty status of the rural farm households. However, scenario is changed after controlling this heterogeneity. After behavioural segregations, TE improves poverty status only for wholesalers. In contrary to prior expectation, it worsens the poverty situation for both autarkic and non-wholesaling households. Simultaneous failure in both credit and product market for these households might be the plausible reason behind this heterodox finding. Credit market failure compels these households to borrow from local money lenders with costlier terms. This effort might improve their TE. But, product market failure makes their additional production due to improved TE unsold. Thus, repayment of credit directly reduces their consumption expenditure. Therefore, an effort to improve TE might increase prevalence and depth of poverty when market failure exists. Henceforth, the improvement of TE appears as an effective policy instrument only when households exhibit wholesaling behaviour.

The earlier studies show the relationship between TE and poverty status but did not account behavioural heterogeneity. The authors attempt to overcome this shortcoming and show how market failure induced behavioural heterogeneity affects the effectiveness of TE on improving poverty status of farm households.

This paper aims to revisit the author’s 2007 “Postcard from Chittagong” to reprise the past decade of activity related to the ship breaking industry of Bangladesh.

The study is based on content analysis of global and local source documentation. This includes academic works, research reports from non-governmental organizations and general and specialist media reports.

Over the past decade, there have been a number of international initiatives that seek to control the disposal and dismantling of redundant ships. However, based on evidence of ongoing environmental and health impacts in Bangladesh, the effectiveness of these is questioned.

The paper is intended to prompt debate on the ship breaking industry in Bangladesh and on the nature of global supply chains and logistics in the consumption society.

The paper revisits and updates a 2007 study that has been referred to and cited in a range of outlets. It is intended to continue and enhance discussion.