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Malnutrition is one of the serious public health problems especially for children and pregnant women in developing countries such as Bangladesh. This study aims to identify the risk factors associated with child nutrition for both male and female children in Bangladesh.

This study was conducted among 23,099 mothers or caretakers of children under five years of age from a nationally representative survey named Bangladesh Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey, 2019. This study used chi-square test statistic for bivariate analysis and multinomial logistic regression was used to evaluate the adjusted effects of those covariates on child nutritional status.

The prevalence of severely malnourished, nourishment was higher for males than females (5.3% vs 5.1%, 77.4% vs 76.8%) while moderately malnourished were higher for females (18.1% vs 17.4%). The findings from the multinomial model insinuated that the mother’s education level, wealth index, region, early child development, mother’s functional difficulties, child disability, reading children's books and diarrhea had a highly significant effect on moderate and severe malnutrition for male children. For the female children model, factors such as mother’s education level, wealth index, fever, child disability, rural, diarrhea, early child development and reading less than three books were significant for moderate and severe malnutrition.

There is a solution to any kind of problem and malnutrition is not an exceptional health problem. So, to overcome this problem, policymakers should take effective measures to improve maternal education level, wealth status, child health.

The main purpose of this paper is to increase the level of knowledge pertaining to nutritional status of preschoolers and to identify/quantifying the relative importance of various socioeconomic and environmental factors which may have significant role in determining nutritional status of preschoolers in Pakistan.

Household food availability, childcare practices, and child health status being focused as proximate determinants of child nutritional status pose problems for the simple regression analysis. An ordinary least squares (OLS) estimation of the regression with nutrition as an outcome and these three proximate variables as determinants could be biased for two reasons. First, there may be unobserved variables that are relegated to the error term but are correlated with the variables included on the right side. Second, explanatory variables may exit that are endogenous or codetermined with the outcome variable and hence are correlated with the error term. The approach to address these problems is to use instrumental variables (IV) approach. The credibility of the IV approach will rest on the ability to find variables that are correlated with the suspected endogenous explanatory variables but that do not affect the outcome variable (other than through the explanatory variable being instrumented).

The results from empirical analysis shows that factors on the maternal and household level are more important determinants of child nutritional status. Food availability, childcare practices and child health (diarrhea) are significantly related to child nutritional status. Household size has negative and significant impact on child nutritional status. Household income has an important and significant impact on child nutritional status. Childcare practices are negatively and significantly related to child nutritional status. This may suggest that as childcare practices improve, they may complement the need for other sources of improved energy for preschooler's nutritional status. The findings suggest that women's education plays a very important role in improving children's nutritional status and that the nutrition status among children depends on both better sanitary conditions and on dietary intake.

Owing to data limitation present analysis employed child calorie adequacy ratio (CCAR) as a proxy of child nutritional status. For that to estimate, commonly used measures are nutrient intake, caloric adequacy ratio and relative caloric allocation.

A key message of this research is that significant achievement could be made toward reducing malnutrition through actions in sectors that have not been the traditional focus of nutritional interventions like improved hygiene conditions.

This could be the first ever effort in describing child nutritional status with the help relative more robust analytical technique for Pakistan.

The main purpose of this study is to identify and quantify the relative importance of various socioeconomic factors and maternal care practices which may have significant role in determining child mortality at different level of child ages in Pakistan.

This paper examines the role of household, demographic and environment factors as determinants of early children mortality in Pakistan. A number of individual, household and local characteristics are related to the probability of child mortality. This study employed a sequential model which is based on a sequence of binary choice models for the conditional probability of choosing a higher response category.

This study identifies that mother feeding protects children from early exposure to diseases and ill‐health in different ways. It also appeared that mother's education is strongly related to neonatal mortality, infant mortality as well as child mortality not only through the improved child caring practices but also through other proximate determinants such as prenatal care, income and environmental contamination.

Social policies attempting to promote early initiation of mother feeding and utilization of prenatal care could make major contribution to the reduction of under five years mortality in Pakistan

Health care intervention programmes should focus on illiterate mothers whose children have all the cumulative risks due to poor health care utilization.

This could be the first ever effort in describing child mortality status with the help of sequential probit technique for Pakistan.

The urbanization of poverty is a structural trend embodied in the sprawling urban slums of the developing countries. It remains a largely unacknowledged dynamic. This is particularly true in terms of the population-level patterns of social well-being derived from urban slum prevalence or proportion of the total population living in urban slum conditions. In particular, there is increasing evidence of an “urban penalty” wherein urban slum dwellers exhibit poorer health outcomes than non-slum urban residents and even rural populations. We articulate the proposition that urban slum prevalence is a key factor shaping population-level rates of social well-being in the developing countries, measured at the national level. Further, we develop the proposition drawn from political economy of health theorization suggesting cross-national dependency relations substantially influence urban slum conditions. In turn, the structural dynamics of the world economy underlie urban slum prevalence which itself has a direct influence on population-level patterns of social well-being as measured by infant and under-five mortality, maternal mortality, and life expectancy at birth. We conclude by arguing for greater empirical attention focusing upon the consequences of dependency relations as expressed in the built urban environment and the impact of urban slum prevalence as a key social condition impacting well-being in the less developed countries.

Social scientists often speculate that both acculturation and socioeconomic status are factors that may explain differences in the body weight between Mexican Americans and whites and between Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants, yet prior research has not explicitly theorized and tested the pathways that lead both of these upstream factors to contribute to ethnic/nativity disparities in weight. We make this contribution to the literature by developing a conceptual model drawing from Glass and McAtee’s (2006) risk regulation framework. We test this model by analyzing data from the 1999–2012 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). Our conceptual model treats acculturation and socioeconomic status as risk regulators, or social factors that place individuals in positions where they are at risk for health risk behaviors that negatively influence health outcomes. We specifically argue that acculturation and low socioeconomic status contribute to less healthy diets, lower physical activity, and chronic stress, which then increases the risk of weight gain. We further contend that pathways from ethnicity/nativity and through acculturation and socioeconomic status likely explain disparities in weight gain between Mexican Americans and whites and between Mexican immigrants and whites. Study results largely support our conceptual model and have implications for thinking about solutions for reducing ethnic/nativity disparities in weight.

This paper aims to develop and argue for a new research path to advance theory on incumbent firm adaptation to discontinuous technological change. Integrating variance and process epistemologies, implications of distinguishing a firm's capacity to adapt from their adaptive choices are highlighted.

The concepts and argument presented are based on an extensive review and synthesis of the literature on the phenomenon.

Distinguishing resource-based capacity variables and behavioral-based choice variables can fuel progress in the literature on incumbent adaptation to technological changes. More attention is needed on the direct, proximate determinants of what occurs in the process of adaptation, e.g. the intermediate choices to adapt, the timing of adaptive actions and the selection of a means for adapting. Work must then associate specific choices with performance outcomes to complete both sides of the mediated cause-effect model connecting characteristics of the decision issue to performance.

Most studies toward understanding how incumbent firms adapt to discontinuous technological innovation have used variance analyses to identify firm and technology characteristics that explain adaptation outcomes. Focusing on characteristics and content, however, does not adequately explain why or how firms adapt. Scholars thus continue to lament the lack of clear, practical theory. I contend one heretofore unaddressed reason for this dissatisfaction is that too much of the research base neglects the importance of understanding choices and the factors affecting them.

A crucial contemporary public health issue is the construction and contestation of the relevance of the natural world to human health.

Taking a critical approach, this chapter examines how the natural environment as a health determinant is positioned in relation to the ‘social’ within social theory generally and social epidemiological studies of health, illness and disease specifically.

– This study shows how current constructions of social and natural environmental health drivers contour social approaches to the study of health and proposes an integrated social-ecological approach for generating new contributions of social epidemiology to research on environmentally driven health injuries.

– The research breaks ground for further social scientific studies of health and the environment and in particular substantiates the call for an extended notion of the ‘environment’ using ecological principles. Methodologically, the interdisciplinary reach of this research draws attention to the tensions that arise when working across the medical, natural and social sciences.

Although understanding the capital structure of firms has been quite commonplace in the empirical literature, there is admittedly limited evidence with regard to the determinants of capital structure for banks. In this context, using data for the period 2000-2012, this paper aims to examine the factors affecting the capital structure of Middle East and North African (MENA) banks.

The data span the period 2000-2012 and comprise of over 100 banks from 12 MENA countries. Given the longitudinal nature of the data, the panel uses panel data techniques and controls for unobserved bank characteristics that might affect capital structure.

The findings indicate that the factors driving book leverage are similar to those influencing market leverage. These findings refute the conventional wisdom that bank capital structure is purely a response to the regulatory requirements, as otherwise, regulatory concerns would have driven a wedge between these two leverage measures. Second, the crisis appears to have exerted a perceptible impact on bank capital. Third, in terms of ownership, it appears that the crisis-support measures had a salutary effect on Islamic banks, in turn improving their growth opportunities.

This is the first study to examine the determinants of capital structure for MENA banks and how it evolved during the crisis. By using both book- and market-related measures of capital structure, the study is able to shed light whether regulatory concerns are a major driven of bank capital. As the recent financial crisis indicates, bank failures impose enormous social and economic costs, which are protracted and significant.

From a practical standpoint, the study seeks to inform the policy debate on the role of regulation in impacting bank capital, especially in the light of the envisaged Basel III reforms. In addition, the study suggests that classroom teaching on bank capital needs to be suitably refined to take on board country-specific requirements and, in addition, focus on how such behavior evolved during the crisis.

This is the first study to examine the determinants of capital structure for MENA banks and how it evolved during the crisis. By using both book- and market-related measures of capital structure, the study is able to shed light whether regulatory concerns are a major driven of bank capital. As the recent financial crisis indicates, bank failures impose enormous social and economic costs, which are protracted and significant.

The purpose of this paper is to obtain empirical evidence on the impacts of socio-economic and demographic factors on the fertility decisions taken by a common family in developing countries like Pakistan. Also, this study contravenes the conventional orthodoxy of childbirth decisions of a family by enlarging the canvas and conjectures the fundamental nexus amongst female’s education, fertility and contraceptive use.

The study is based on micro-level data, obtained from the Pakistan Demographic and Health Survey (2012-2013) which is the third survey carried out in Pakistan. Demographic and socio-economic profiles of 13,558 ever-married women, aged 15-49 years, were randomly selected from Gilgit Baltistan and the four provinces of Pakistan. Three dependent variables are used in empirical analysis i.e. current use of contraceptives, total fertility and cumulative fertility. In order to estimate the probability of contraceptive use maximum likelihood, Probit technique is employed with ordinary least squares on reduced form specifications of total fertility and cumulative fertility models.

The empirical results proved the hypotheses that educated females practice more family planning through modern contraceptives which leads to a decrease in total fertility rates. Some significant links among females’ education, contraceptive use and fertility define the quantity – quality trade-off and opportunity cost of time. Evidently, female education provides maturity and awareness of family size which is necessary to take crucial economic decisions.

The empirical evidence suggests that maximum efforts should be made toward women’s education. The current standard of education in Pakistan is not enough to overcome the long-standing problem of excessive child birth. This could be done with the help of public – private partnership as the measures taken by the government alone are insufficient. The government should initiate some adequate measures such as education and awareness about contraceptive usage at the secondary school level that could be a vivacious step to support fertility reduction.

The framework used in this study provides a broader intra-household income–expenditure approach. With a smaller family size, the household’s income would be shared among fewer individuals. It is highly probable that parents would be more attentive if they need to look after a few children. That is the best way to progress their children with limited resources.

From the socioeconomic perspectives, educated parents plan the ideal family size which allows them to spend more on their children’s upbringing.

This study captures the magnitude of fertility decisions with the relevance of the wife’s education because the present practice in Pakistan does not allow higher education for married women. This is why this study could be used as a benchmark for further study in the same area.