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The present study surveyed consumers in Taiwan and Japan to analyse the influence of marketing mix on purchase intention and the willingness to pay for Taiwanese pork and to establish a marketing-oriented model of consumer behaviour.

A total of 1,134 valid Internet surveys were collected, which included 526 Taiwanese respondents and 608 Japanese respondents.

An analysis of the results indicated that product quality constitutes the foundation of marketing strategies and significantly affects purchase intention and willingness to pay through physical evidence, promotional activities, place and price. Both physical evidence and product strongly affect the purchase intention of Taiwanese consumers, followed by price, whereas price and physical evidence significantly affect willingness to pay. For Japanese consumers, price, product and promotion strongly affect purchase intention, but place and physical evidence exert negative effects; by contrast, price and promotion significantly affect willingness to pay.

The results determined that a modified marketing mix should be applied for agricultural products. In the domestic market, marketing should promote the modernisation and scale of pork farms and possibly the brand value or market rarity. In international markets, particularly those of neighbouring countries, marketing should focus on the promotion of Taiwanese pork as a high-quality, reasonably-priced product with transparent product information and convenient purchase channels. This study contributes to the application of marketing theory to the market for staple foods by incorporating considerations for domestic and international markets.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate opportunities for early childhood development (ECD) regarding children’s prenatal care, access to nutrition, health, parental care and cognitive-developmental activities, in 33 surveys from 13 countries. A total of 15 indicators for children’s opportunities are assessed including their typical level, inequality across demographic groups, and factors responsible.

Probability regressions estimate the effects of various household circumstances on children’s engagement in development opportunities. Dissimilarity indexes and human opportunity indexes are computed for each ECD dimension. To understand the impact of each household characteristic, Shorrocks-Shapley decomposition is performed.

ECD opportunities are poor but improving and becoming more equal across many countries. Progress is uneven. As may be expected, household wealth affects inequality for ECD opportunities facilitated by markets or governments, but not non-market opportunities. For preventive healthcare and preschool enrollment, access is deteriorating, reflecting low priority given to them in public policy. Children’s height falls behind in the first two years of children’s life, suggesting the need for targeted institutional interventions. Surprisingly, countries experiencing uprisings see conditions improving, while other Arab countries see them stagnating or deteriorating.

Local and national policy should tackle the identified opportunity gaps. Policymakers should allocate proper investment in medical and educational infrastructure and better coordinate support for disadvantaged families to ensure proper prenatal and ECD. International organizations should provide assistance with these programs.

COVID-19 has had various effects on women’s labour supply worldwide. This study investigates how women’s labour market outcomes in the MENA region have been affected by the stringency of governments’ COVID-19 responses and school closures. We examine whether women, particularly those with children at young age, reduced their labour supply to take care of their families during the pandemic.

To investigate whether having a family results in an extra penalty to women’s labour market outcomes, we compare single women to married women and mothers. Using the ERF COVID-19 MENA Monitor Household Surveys, we analyse the key conditions underlying women’s labour market outcomes: (1) wage earnings and labour market status including remaining formally employed, informally, unpaid or self-employed, unemployed or out of the labour force and (2) becoming permanently terminated, being suspended, seeing a reduction in the hours worked or wages, or seeing a delay in one’s wage payments because of COVID-19. Ordered probit and multinomial logit are employed in the case of categorical outcomes, and linear models for wage earnings.

Women, regardless of whether they have children or not, appear to join the labour market out of necessity to help their families in the times of crisis. Child-caring women who are economically inactive are also more likely to enter the labour market. There is little difference between the negative experiences of women with children and child-free women in regard to their monthly pay reduction or delay, or contract termination, but women with children were more likely to experience reduction in hours worked throughout the pandemic.

These findings may not have causal interpretation facilitating accurate inference. This is because of potential omitted variables such as endogenous motivation of women in different circumstances, latent changes in the division of domestic work between care-giving and other household members, or selective sample attrition.

Our analysis explores the multiple channels in which the pandemic has affected the labour outcomes of MENA-region women. Our findings highlight the challenges that hamper the labour market participation of women, and suggest that public policy should strive to balance the share of unpaid care work between men and women and increase men’s involvement, through measures that support child-bearing age women’s engagement in the private sector during crises, invest in childcare services and support decent job creation for all.

Personality characteristics have a significant impact on the economic segment of women entrepreneurs. Due to gender biases or other factors, women entrepreneurs are fewer in India than in other countries. The purpose of this study is to identify the personality factors and challenges that affect their growth and success.

Logistic regression was used to show the impact of personality characteristics and firm performance and the moderating effect of challenges between personality characteristics and firm performance.

The findings revealed a significant impact of personality factors on firm performance, the absence of moderating effects of challenges and the presence of a mediation effect of enterprise age and enterprise location.

This research will help policymakers adopt policies and plans to reduce obstacles and challenges so that the economic conditions of women’s entrepreneurship can transform.

Women in the 21st century still live in a male-dominated patriarchal society because they face the problem of financial capital.

The results show the impact of personality traits and challenges on the firm performance of women’s entrepreneurship.

This paper constructs real wage series for nineteenth-century Algeria and Tunisia, and compares them with existing Egyptian and Syrian series. Archival sources are used for price and nominal wage data. Following Allen (2001), nominal wages are deflated with a consumer price index. The series are tested for robustness. Real wages were initially dispersed, but converged to similar levels by the end of the period. There is no evidence of a broad-based improvement in living standards over the period, with real wage series declining in Algeria, and stagnating in Egypt, Tunisia and Syria. The findings paint a less optimistic picture of living standards compared to other measures like GDP per capita and compared to some of the historical literature. Data for the Maghreb are scarce, and more work will need to be done on finding more wage and price observations.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the school-to-work transition of young people from subsequent school exit cohorts between 2001 and 2012 in Egypt, thus, presenting an early evidence on the adjustments of the labor market in terms of patterns of youth transition to a first job following the 2011 Egyptian uprising.

The analysis compares the early employment outcomes of those who left school after the January 25, 2011 uprising to that of those who left before 2011. The authors also separately control for the cohorts who left school in 2008 and 2009, in an attempt to disentangle any labor market adjustments that might have happened following the financial crisis, and before the revolution. Using novel and unexploited representative data from the 2014 Survey of Young People in Egypt (SYPE), the authors estimate the probability of transition to any first job within 18 months from leaving education and that of the transition to a good-quality job, controlling for the year of school exit. The authors also estimate the hazard of finding a first job and a good-quality job using survival analysis.

School exit cohorts of 2008–2009 (following the financial crisis) and those of 2011–2012 (in the aftermath of the 2011 uprisings) experienced a significantly higher likelihood of finding a first job within 18 months than that of the cohorts of 2001–2007. However, this came at the expense of the quality of job, conditional on having found a first job. The results of the hazard model show that school leavers after 2008 who were not able to transition to a job shortly after leaving school experienced longer unemployment spells than their peers who left school before 2007. The odds of finding a good-quality job appears to decline with time spent in non-employment or in a bad-quality first job.

This paper contributes to a limited, yet growing, literature on how school-to-work transition evolved during the global financial crisis and the Egyptian 2011 revolution. Using data from SYPE 2014, the most recent representative survey conducted in Egypt on youth and not previously exploited to study youth school-to-work transition, the paper investigates the short-term adjustments of the youth labor market opportunities during that critical period of Egypt and the region’s history.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the prevalence and drivers of employment vulnerability among youth in Egypt, Jordan and Tunisia, and their propensity to transition to better jobs over time.

The analysis is based on longitudinal data from Labor Market Panel Surveys spanning 6–20 years. The authors use transition matrices to examine the prevalence of transitions between labor market statuses for the same individuals over time, distinguishing between youth and non-youth, and men and women, as well as multinomial logistic regressions that control for individual and family background, including previous labor market status, family wealth and parental education.

The paper finds that youth in all three countries were disadvantaged in terms of labor market outcomes with most young men in particular ending up in vulnerable jobs while women of all ages were most likely to exit the labor market all together, unless they had formal jobs. Moreover, youth who started out in the labor market in a vulnerable job were unlikely to move to a better-quality job over time. Family wealth, parental education and father's occupation were found to be important determinants of labor market outcomes and vulnerability, even after a long period of work experience.

The paper finds that wealth effects, parental education and occupation effects follow workers throughout their careers, implying low equality of opportunity and inter-generational and lifetime mobility.

The findings indicate worsening labor market outcomes over time, heavily influenced by family background. High levels of vulnerable employment persistence, regardless of skill and experience, reinforce the importance of initial labor market outcome on the quality of lifetime employment prospects.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the trend of off-farm employment in rural China over the past four decades since the reform and opening-up.

Using two sets of panel survey data, the China National Rural Survey conducted in 2000 and 2008, and the China Rural Development Survey conducted in 2005, 2008, 2012 and 2016, this study offers a re-visit of China’s off-farm employment to give us the latest information about its evolution and whether rural labor markets have developed in a way that will allow them to facilitate the transformation of China’s economy more effectively. The evolution of off-farm employment is further examined through decomposition of types, destinations, industries, and population sub-groups as well as the change in the wage rate.

The data show the rapid increase in rural labor activities over the whole study period. Most notably, the authors findnd that a rapid rise in off-farm employment has continued even until after 2008 and into the mid-2010s, which is a time when some feared that macroeconomic conditions might keep rural residents on the farm or drive them back to the farm. In the disaggregation of labor market trends, the authors show that labor markets are acting consistently with an economy that is in transition from being dominated by agriculture to being dominated by other forms of production and with a population that is consistently becoming more urban.

The authors believe that the results will contribute positively to the exploration of answers to the question whether or not rural labor markets have developed in a way that will allow them to facilitate the transformation of China’s economy more effectively over the last four decades.

The Islamic banking system is not very primordial, but recently it is getting popular. Now it becomes a prominent topic to investigate what are the reasons behind it and how it happens. This study aims to identify the influencing factors in the time of opening account in Islamic banks.

A descriptive and factor analysis method were carried out to collect the quantitative data using a validated structured questionnaire. This study is based on a survey of 300 clients from Bangladesh who have at least one bank account in any Islamic banks in Bangladesh.

The findings of the study revealed that the most important factors influencing the people to open an account in Islamic banks including high Riba (Interest) on saving, ATM facility, confirmation SMS on the transaction, availability of branch service in several locations, lower cost on financing (loan), low initial deposit fee for account opening, employees’ prompt service and their behavior, etc. Also, the other religious people, rather than Islam, start a banking relationship with Islamic banks without any obligation.

The study focused only on a certain area of Bangladesh. This study could be extended for a different target market, creative strategy, other media and more countries.

The paper provides guidelines to the management of Islamic banks to decide to attract more customers by focusing on the influencing factors that manipulate a person to open a bank account.

The research is original. There are very few studies available on this topic, particularly focusing on Bangladesh. Consequently, the research findings have significant implications for Islamic banks functioning in a predominantly Islamic atmosphere.

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