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The purpose of this paper is to contribute original evidence about the conditions for formal and informal contracts for commodities and labour in the waste economy of a South Indian town.

Field research was exploratory, based on snowball sampling and urban traversing. The analysis follows capital and labour in the sub-circuits of capital generating waste in production, distribution, consumption, the production of labour and the reproduction of society.

Regardless of legal regulation, which is selectively enforced, formal contracts are limited to active inspection regimes; direct transactions with or within the state; and long-distance transactions. Formal labour contracts are least incomplete for state employment, and for relatively scarce skilled labour in the private sector.

The research design does not permit quantified generalisations.

Waste management technology evaluations neglect the social costs of displacing a large informal labour force.

While slowly dissolving occupational barriers of untouchability, the waste economy is a low-status labour absorber of last resort, exit from which is extremely difficult.

The first systematic exploration of formal and informal contracts in an Indian small-town waste economy.

Improving milling quality is expected to improve the quality of domestic rice and hence the competitiveness of Uganda's rice industry. Therefore, this study aims to assess the determinants of four aspects of milling, namely, choice of milling technology, millers' perceptions of the importance of paddy quality attributes, milling return and milling capacity.

Multinomial logit, semi-nonparametric extended ordered probit, linear regression and additive nonparametric models are applied to cross-sectional data obtained from a sample of 196 rice millers.

Physical, economic, institutional, technological and sociodemographic factors are found to be important determinants of the four aspects of milling. Physical factors include the distance of the mill from major town and availability of storage space at the milling premises, while economic factors include milling charge and backward integration of miller into paddy production. Contracting and use of a single-pass mill are important institutional and technological factors, respectively, and miller's household size, age, gender and education are the key sociodemographic variables.

The study's originality lies in its scope, especially in terms of its breadth. Without compromising the needed analytical rigor, it focuses on four aspects of milling that are critical to improving the marketing of Uganda's rice. In doing so, it provides a holistic understanding of this segment of the value chain and offers specific recommendations for improving the marketing of Uganda's rice.

Weaknesses in the grades and standards system in low-income countries across Sub-Saharan Africa undermine the transparency of agricultural markets. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Ghana and Mozambique rice is predominately sold in open bags and if rice price does not reflect its quality, then inefficiencies may lead to consumer welfare losses. Importantly, it is possible that impoverished communities are priced out of the market due to inflated and inefficient prices. The objective of this study is to examine determinates of rice price by estimating the impact of selected rice quality attributes on rice prices in Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ghana and Mozambique.

We collected 363 rice samples from open air markets in Bukavu (DRC), Nampula (Mozambique) and across Ghana in 2019. Each rice sample was analyzed in a food science lab for the quality attributes: percentage of chalk and brokens, chalk impact, length and length-to-width ratio. We used multiple regression analysis to estimate if and to what extent quality attributes were the drivers of price.

Findings suggest that there are irregularities in the Ghanaian market for broken rice and that regardless of quality, imported rice is priced higher than domestic rice. In the DRC and Mozambique, our results indicate price is driven by length and length-to-width ratio in the former and length-to-width ratio in the latter.

Rice samples were purchased from market vendors and thus consumer preferences for attributes were not revealed.

These results provide valuable insight to policymakers regarding the need for proper labeling and regulation of open bag rice sales in an effort to increase consumer welfare and improve food security.

The consumption of rice that contains high levels of inorganic arsenic may cause human health risk. This study aims to determine As species concentrations, particularly iAs, in raw rice in Ho Chi Minh (HCM) City and its health risks.

A total of 60 polished raw composite samples of rice were purchased from traditional markets and supermarkets in HCM City. All samples were analyzed by HPLC-ICPMS for As species determination.

Mean concentrations of inorganic arsenic in all samples, which were purchased from supermarket and traditional market, were 88.8 µg/kg and 80.6 µg/kg, respectively. Overall, inorganic arsenic level was 84.7 µg/kg and contributed the highest proportion of arsenic species in rice with 67.7%. The proportion profiles for arsenic species were: As (III) (60 %); dimethylarsinic acid (32.2 %); As (V) (7.7 %) and methylarsonic acid (0.1 %). Inorganic arsenic level in raw rice was below the recommendation of World Health Organization. Using the benchmark dose recommended by the Joint FAO/WHO Expert Committee on Food Additives (JECFA), all exposure doses were lower than BMDL05. However, as the doses ranged from 3.0 to 8.6 of Margin of Exposure (MOE), the health risk of iAs from rice consumption remains public health concern.

The study results report on the surveillance data of the presence of inorganic arsenic in raw rice products, which are available in the supermarkets and traditional markets, and its health risk to consumers in a metropolitan city in Vietnam.

The different performance tests were conducted on diesel engine compression ignition (CI) mode and CRDi engine.

The CI engine was suitably modified to CRDi engine with Toroidal re-entrant combustion chamber (TRCC) and was run in dual-fuel (DF) mode. Hydrogen (H₂) was supplied at different flow rates during the suction stroke, and 0.22 Kg/h of hydrogen fuel flow rate (HFFR) was found to be optimum. Diesel and biodiesel were used as pilot fuels. The CRDi engine with DF mode was run at various injection pressures, and 900 bar was found to be optimum injection pressure (IP) with 10o before top dead center (bTDC) as fuel injection timing (IT).

These operating engine conditions increased formation of oxides of nitrogen (NOx), which were reduced by exhaust gas recycle (EGR). With EGR of 15%, CRDi engine resulted in 12.6% lower brake thermal efficiency (BTE), 5.5% lower hydrocarbon (HC), 7.7% lower carbon monoxide (CO), 26% lower NOx at 80% load as compared to the unmodified diesel engine (CI mode).

The current research is an effort to study and evaluate the performance of CRDi engine in DF mode with diesel-H₂ and BCPO-H₂ fuel combinations with TRCC.

The major objective of this research work was to evaluate various physico-chemical characteristics, such as, chemical composition, antioxidant capacity, objective color and texture profile analysis (TPA) of the wheat flour/chickpea flour (CF) blends, so that nutritious baked products could be consumed by the type-2 diabetic persons.

Wholegrain wheat flour (WGF) and white wheat flour (WWF) were substituted with CF at 0 to 40% levels. These wheat flour/CF blends were analyzed for proximate composition, the prepared dough and baked breads were tested for objective color, antioxidant capacity as trolox equivalent antioxidant capacity (TEAC), malondialdehyde (MDA) and total phenolic content (TPC) and TPA.

WGF had the highest TEAC (117.42 mM/100g) value, followed by WWF (73.98 mM/100g) and CF (60.67 mM/100g). TEAC, MDA and TPC values varied significantly among all the three flour samples.

Inclusion of whole chickpea (without dehulling) flour in such type of blends would be another interesting investigation during the future research studies.

These research findings have a great potential for the production of these baked products for human consumption on an industrial scale.

Production of breads using wheat flour and CF blends would benefits the consumers.

Production of Arabic and pan breads using wheat flour and CF blends would, therefore, combine the benefits of both the needed proteins of plant origin and the health-promoting bioactive compounds, in a most sustainable way for the consumers.

This paper aims to propose a hybrid-forecasting model for long-term tourism demand forecasting. As such, it attempts to model the tourism demand in the Philippines, which is a relatively underrepresented area in the literature, despite its tourism sector’s growing economic progress.

A hybrid support vector regression (SVR) – seasonal autoregressive integrated moving averages (SARIMA) model is proposed to model the seasonal, linear and nonlinear components of the tourism demand in a destination country. The paper further proposes the use of multiple criteria decision-making (MCDM) approaches in selecting the best forecasting model among a set of considered models. As such, a preference ranking organization method for enrichment of evaluations (PROMETHEE) II is used to rank the considered forecasting models.

The proposed hybrid SVR-SARIMA model is the best performing model among a set of considered models in this paper using performance criteria that evaluate the errors of magnitude, directionality and trend change, of a forecasting model. Moreover, the use of the MCDM approach is found to be a relevant and prospective approach in selecting the best forecasting model among a set of models.

The novelty of this paper lies in several aspects. First, this paper pioneers the demonstration of the SVR-SARIMA model’s capability in forecasting long-term tourism demand. Second, this paper is the first to have proposed and demonstrated the use of an MCDM approach for performing model selection in forecasting. Finally, this paper is one of the very few papers to provide lenses on the current status of Philippine tourism demand.