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This paper seeks to apply an improved electrometric method using polarized electrodes to quantify iodine in 241 salt samples pertaining to 15 different brands procured from the local market.Design/methodology/approach – Comparative evaluation of the method is made with the iodometric titration and the colorimetric methods.

The results obtained reveal that the electrometric method excels in attaining higher level of accuracy, precision and lower detection limit, backed by ease of operation.

The method warrants reproducible results both for replicate synthetic and market samples, with a lower detection limit of about 0.1ppm within an acceptable limit of error.

The study shows significant difference between the estimated and labelled iodine values in various brands of iodized salts. Most of the salt samples analysed contain iodine levels far exceeding the WHO permitted limit. The method has the potential of application for in‐situ iodine measurement in iodine fortified salts to ensure rapid quality control, both at the retailer and production levels.

Levels of 12 metals (Ca, K, Na, Mg, Cu, Fe, Mn, Zn, Cd, Cr, Pb and Ni) were estimated in 19 different imported brands of unexpired and expired canned dry milk available from local markets. The HNO₃/HClO₄‐based wet digestion method was used for the analysis of the samples by the FAAS technique under optimum analytical conditions. Of the macronutrients, Ca showed highest at 1,144 μg/g in the dry milk from Holland. In the case of micronutrients, Fe showed the maximum level at 119.15 μg/kg in the milk from UK. Cr dominated at 23.19 μg/kg compared with other heavy toxic trace elements. The following order of decreasing concentration was observed for both unexpired and expired milk: Ca > Na > K > Mg > Fe > Zn > Cr > Pb > Cu > Ni > Cd. All the trace elements were found to have 100 per cent incidence of occurrence. The expired milk samples showed enhanced levels of Fe, Zn, Cr and Pb by a factor of 1.2‐1.6 on average. The results of the metal contents were compared with those for fresh cow milk. The data were statistically evaluated to find bivariate correlation between the metals in pre‐ and post‐expiry milks.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the perceived thermal comfort experienced by active Muslim women (AMW) wearing hijabs determined by their experience of comfort sensation while doing sports activities or regular exercises. This study also examines whether the casual hijabs which are widely used among AMW are able to supply the appropriate comfort for active purposes.

This study used the quantitative method using survey questionnaires to collect 100 primary data obtained from AMW respondents who are university students located around the Klang Valley region in Malaysia.

Based on the overall results, this study suggests that the common hijabs that are used for casual applications do not offer sufficient comfort to Muslim women while performing sports activities or regular exercises.

The outcome of this study will help to gain a better understanding on hijab preferences and comfort experienced from the viewpoint of regular hijab users. The information will assist industries to consider the selection of the right materials when developing sportswear hijabs to provide better comfort for more AMW in the near future. The method used in this study is useful to gain information on consumer’s profile and value-added details about the discomfort aspects of hijab which are scarce in the existing literature on thermal comfort.

This study was conducted to explore the type of hijabs commonly worn by AMW while performing sports activities and to obtain their views on the perceived thermal comfort.

Drawing on social cognitive career theory (SCCT), this study aims to examine how university students’ attitude towards entrepreneurship education (ATEE) consists of affective, cognitive and behavioral components influences their entrepreneurial intentions. It further examines the role of entrepreneurial self-efficacy (ESE) as a mediator and social norms as a moderator in the ATEE – entrepreneurial intentions and – ESE relationships, respectively.

A sample of 428 university students from the new generational cohort entering workforce now (i.e. generation Z) from the four main cities of the province of Punjab, Pakistan, were considered using an online administered questionnaire. The study analyzes data using SPSS v25 and AMOS v22 and presents descriptive statistics, reliability, validity analysis and linear regression analysis. Furthermore, to test mediation and moderation hypotheses, Hayes’ PROCESS macro v3.0 was used.

The results confirm that individuals’ ATEE based on affective, cognitive and behavioral components have significant influence on entrepreneurial intentions. The findings also confirm the strong mediating role of ESE between the components of ATEE and entrepreneurial intentions. Furthermore, the conditional effects results confirm that social norms strengthened the positive relationships between the affective, behavioral and cognitive components of ATEE – ESE at three levels (low, medium and high).

This study is the first of its nature to unlock the missing link between ATEE’s components and entrepreneurial intentions using the theoretical foundations of SCCT. Furthermore, this study provides theoretical and practical implications specifically considering a developing country – Pakistan.

This paper provides a snapshot of educational and economic trends across South Asia with an exploratory and comparative approach. Before COVID-19, South Asia was the world’s fastest-growing regional economy, concurrently achieving major strides in poverty reduction and access to education. Despite the region’s economic and educational accomplishments, the countries of South Asia fall short of international benchmarks in public education expenditure, resulting in a persistent lag in educational quality that hampers individuals, the workforce, and overall economic productivity. The paper highlights themes in the literature, including context-specific evidence for the various theories of economic growth, the returns to education, and educational inputs (e.g., teachers and private schools) that highlight how spending can be leveraged to increase educational outcomes. In addition, it examines the relationship between education, poverty, and marginalization factors that explain why some populations are deprived of education and its benefits. We provide a broad perspective of the dynamics of the economics of education and the related challenges in this region. This discussion aims to enhance the understanding of the inefficiencies in South Asia’s educational systems and, ultimately, in the development of the region’s human capacities.

The objective of this research is to investigate the impact of offering product-linked services on the effectiveness of risk management and, subsequently, on financial performance.

The investigation is based on an empirical analysis employing structural equation modeling (SEM) and cross-industry and multi-country survey data of 307 companies. The theorization is guided by the information processing theory (IPT).

Considering the basic and advanced classification of services, the analysis suggests that only the provision of advanced services influences the effectiveness of risk management. Specifically, the provision of advanced services strengthens the preventive dimension of risk management. Surprisingly, the analysis reveals a negative direct impact of preventive risk management on financial performance. Preventive risk management, however, indirectly enhances financial performance by supporting reactive risk management.

For practitioners, the research suggests a positive impact of servitization in a long term rather than in form of instant financial benefits. The research attempts to highlight the specific role of supply chain risk management (SCRM) through which servitization has a positive impact on financial performance.

Although there are assumptions about both reduction and increase in risk when manufacturers offer services, the extant literature lacks an empirical investigation on the association between servitization and the effectiveness of risk management. This study addresses the stated gap and offers novel insights into the role of SCRM in the performance consequences of servitization.

The COVID-19 pandemic is having an unprecedented impact on schools and schoolchildren across the globe. There is still a dearth of studies that investigate this recent phenomenon in a developing country context, and this is true of Pakistan. Much of the population in Pakistan resides in rural settings and a lack of technology and of online provision of teaching for more than one year must have had huge negative impacts on students’ learning. The school dropout rate was already high in rural settings (Geven & Hasan, 2020) and, with school closures, this will likely have increased further, and cause some schoolchildren to lose interest in going back to school. However, no current data appear to exist to corroborate this. Due to the lack of available current quantitative and qualitative data, this study seeks to explore the impact of COVID-19 on schoolchildren’s education in Pakistan by examining recently published related studies. This study employs a literature review technique that gathers data to ascertain the potential overall impact on schoolchildren during the pandemic. The findings reveal that there remains a lack of detailed studies on this important topic and that urgent attention is needed from researchers to assess the scale of the impact. In addition, the review found that many children from rural communities had little to no school engagement due to technology poverty and their families being unable to support home-schooling, either due to family and/or work constraints or a lack of prior education and/or skills. Themes that emerged were that families, especially mothers, struggled to balance both caring and home-schooling duties, pupils from private schools had a better experience than those from public school backgrounds, and many of these reported that online provisions helped students develop new skills. This study may help to improve the understanding of the impact on the lost learning of schoolchildren during the pandemic by guiding practitioners as well as policymakers.

Introduction: Why companies pay dividends and the determinants of dividend policy are considered an unresolved dividend puzzle. To reach a consensus over the puzzle, researchers must investigate the factors affecting dividend policy by incorporating all the determinants into a single research effort.

Purpose: We examine the dividend policy determinants of Sri Lankan firms, explicitly focusing on the banking, finance, and insurance (BFI) sectors.

Methodology: This study uses the quantitative approach applying the Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) system to examine the dividend policy determinants by obtaining secondary data from 51 listed BFI organisations in Sri Lanka.

Findings: The analysis disclosed that the variables of changes in revenues, firm size, liquidity, corporate tax, business risk, and profitability have a positive relationship with dividend yield, whereas investment opportunities, leverage, change in revenues, corporate tax, and firm size impact positively on the propensity to pay dividends in BFI organisations in Sri Lanka. Our findings opine that managers in the BFI industries should prioritise changing their dividend policies by paying close attention to factors, such as dividend yield, changes in revenue, firm size, liquidity, corporate tax ratio, business risk, and profitability because the dividend policy is critical to retaining current investors and luring new ones.

The purpose of this paper is to explain the relationship between supply chain information management, supply chain information system (IS) infrastructure, supply chain integration and the manufacturing performance of firms in manufacturing industry in Malaysia. Therefore, the study addresses a gap in research concerning the effect of supply chain information practices toward manufacturing performance.

The research design for this study employed the quantitative method using survey questionnaires that have been developed based on a thorough and detailed analysis of the relevant literature. Based on a sample consist of 248 usable data, mediated multiple regression analysis was used to examine the research model.

The findings indicate that supply chain integration fully mediates the relationship between supply chain information management and supply chain information system infrastructure (ISI) toward manufacturing performance.

This research is limited to a particular sample: i.e. electrical and electronics manufacturing firms in Peninsular Malaysia. Thus, the results need to be generalized to encompass wider samples.

Organizations interest in making all members in their supply chain to communicate using information network to support managers in better decision making while adopting more enhanced information management and system infrastructure. As a plus, it helps in integrating various internal and external value chain processes across manufacturing firms in the organization’s supply chain network. As result, manufacturing firms could improve their performance in the long run.

The originality of this study lies in employing a newly developed framework-based existing theoretical argument to examine the effectiveness of supply chain information management and system infrastructure with an improved influence from supply chain integration toward the manufacturing performance.

As a result, the current study attempted to investigate the impact of green human resource (GHR) practices on long-term performance, and the path has been explained through organizational identification, which is supported by social identity theory.

To achieve the present study's primary goal, data were obtained from manufacturing businesses and analyzed using partial least square (Smart PLS) on the data of 284 Pakistani small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) registered with the small and medium-sized enterprises development authority (SMEDA).

As a result, the findings show that organizational identification explains the indirect relationship between sustainable performance and green human resource management (GHRM).

To limit the limited negative effect on the environment and society, the findings provide several suggestions for the government authorities and policymakers to adopt green practices and policies.

Green practices are essential for a company to limit its negative environmental effect. Environmental critical problems among shareholders put pressure on the firm to implement GHR practices and organizational identification with long-term success.