Suchergebnisse

Western Balkans, consisting of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Kosovo, NorthMacedonia, Albania and Montenegro, is one of the regions that have been heavilyaffected by the Covid-19 pandemic. Although the numbers are relatively low compared toother countries affected by the virus, the region's fragile political and economiccircumstance have made it vulnerable to the pandemic. The violent breakup ofYugoslavia continue to affect the region's international relations and domestic politics.Furthermore, Western Balkan states are some of the few European countries that are stillnot members of the European Union (EU) .Every day, people are losing jobs and income, with no way of knowing when normalitywill return. The Western Balkans rely heavily on the steady inflow of remittances, whichfinancing domestic demand and investment. Remittances, which constitute 10% of theGDP in these countries , are likely to diminish because of travel restrictions andincreased unemployment in the countries of Western Europe. [1]. The World Bankprojects a US$110 billion decline in remittances this year, which could mean 800 millionpeople will not be able to meet their basic needs [2]. Due to business shutdowns, supplysidedisruptions, reduce household incomes, depress demand these countries results infall in gross domestic product.To mitigate the social impacts of the crisis, governments in all six countries haveintroduced measures to support households and businesses. To ease the effects of thepandemic, governments in the region have turned towards international institutions suchas the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the EU for financial assistance.As these countries do not have sufficient health infrastructure to deal with a widenumber of cases, these support have been useful to contain the spread of the virus.

Background. Repeated mass drug administration (MDA) with preventive chemotherapies is the mainstay of morbidity control for schistosomiasis and soil-transmitted helminths, yet the World Health Organization recently reported that less than one-third of individuals who required preventive chemotherapies received treatment. Methods. Coverage of community-directed treatment with praziquantel (PZQ) and albendazole (ALB) was analyzed in 17 villages of Mayuge District, Uganda. National drug registers, household questionnaires, and parasitological surveys were collected to track 935 individuals before and after MDA. Multilevel logistic regressions, including household and village effects, were specified with a comprehensive set of socioeconomic and parasitological variables. The factors predicting who did not receive PZQ and ALB from community medicine distributors were identified. Results. Drug receipt was correlated among members within a household, and nonrecipients of PZQ or ALB were profiled by household-level socioeconomic factors. Individuals were less likely to receive either PZQ or ALB if they had a Muslim household head or low home quality, belonged to the minority tribe, or had settled for more years in their village. Untreated individuals were also more likely to belong to households that did not purify drinking water, had no home latrine, and had no members who were part of the village government. Conclusions. The findings demonstrate how to locate and target individuals who are not treated in MDA. Infection risk factors were not informative. In particular, age, gender, and occupation were unable to identify non-recipients, although World Health Organization guidelines rely on these factors. Individuals of low socioeconomic status, minority religions, and minority tribes can be targeted to expand MDA coverage.

Gender bias had been an old phenomena throughout the world. Women have always taken a back seat in economic, political and social structure in any society across the globe and this all because of the socialization and the patriarchal society. Though half the population of the world constitutes of women & girls but their contribution in most of areas are not significant. The biggest challenge for any government is the empowerment of women to bring them and contribute in the mainstream activities. Today in 21st century there is no doubt that Information and Communication Technology (ICT) helps every one in every possible field.Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has become a significant and integral part of our life. Information and Communication Technology (ICT) can be defined as a diverse set of electronic technologies and technological tools and resources used to communicate, create, store, disseminate and manage information. Information Communication Technology such as videos, televisions, multimedia and computer software which combines text, sound, and colorful moving images can be used to provide challenging and authentic content that will engage the learning process Women play an important role in various sectors such as economic, political, social, sports, educational, enterprising etc. The objective of the present paper is to examine the relationship between the role of information and communication technologies (ICT) and women empowerment and discusses the main challenges and impediments faced by women, recommends strategies to address those challenges and ways to cultivate the conditions leading to women's empowerment. This conceptual paper is based on secondary information collected from different sources such as books, journal articles, newspapers,reports of various government organization, nongovernmental organizations and soon.

The COVID-19 pandemic is a huge challenge to education systems. Education is the main priority direction and main development indicator in all civilized countries of the world. The COVID-19 global pandemic has upended all the education system across the world. In this time of crisis, a well-rounded and effective educational practice is what is needed for the capacity-building of young minds. It will develop skills that will drive their employability, productivity, health, and well-being in the decades to come, and ensure the overall progress of India. This research paper tries to investigate on the various impact of Covid-19 in education system especially on rural India. We also try to throw light on the different existing and new initiatives by government during the pandemic. The novel coronavirus has transformed the centuries-old, chalk–talk teaching model to one driven by technology. The last 50 years have seen huge growth worldwide in the provision of education at all levels. COVID-19 is the greatest challenge that these expanded national education systems have ever faced. Many governments have ordered institutions to cease face-to-face instruction for most of their students, requiring them to switch, almost overnight, to online teaching and virtual education. We see a drastic rise in the use of various teaching and conferencing technologies which has been explained in this paper, also various advantages and disadvantages to the students in the use of these technologies have been covered in this research paper by identifying opportunities and trends. Finally research has been concluded by providing avenues to future research and a meaningful conclusion.

Coronavirus is believed to have originated from a wet market in Wuhan, China, and has spread all over the world, resulting in a large number of hospitalizations and deaths. Social scientists are just beginning to understand its consequences on human behavior. One policy that public health officials put in place to help stop the spread of the virus were stay-at-home/shelter-in-place lockdown-style orders.Schools, Colleges and Universities across the country have now been shut down till now due to Covid-19. Some Governments in India impose lockdown to reduce the crises created by this unknown virus. It is now difficult to make final assessments by school, school leaving examinations and entrance tests for undergraduate and post-graduate courses. This disruption implies for students across the socio-economic spectrum, both in terms of learning outcomes, food and economic security. Here the aim is to discuss the implications of lockdown-induced in schools in both urban and rural areas in India. The whole world implemented a nationwide lockdown to curb the transmission of the virus. A survey was over Five hundred families to complete a questionnaire with questions around symptoms of depression, anxiety, stress, and family affluence. The humans who do not have enough supplies to sustain the lockdown were most affected Families with affluence were found to be negatively correlated with stress, anxiety, and depression. Stress, anxiety, and depression more than others are seen in students and healthcare professionals. The main aim of the paper is to find out how symptoms of depression, anxiety and stress on parents due to COVID-19.

This paper examines whether linking the institutional design of public-private partnerships (PPPs) to international policy instruments lead to PPPs external effectiveness. To answer this question, I selected the Global Alliance for Trade Facilitation (GATF) as a study case. GATF is an emerging PPP aimed at making international trade simple, fast and cost-effective while creating new business opportunities, enabling greater economic and social development and reduc-ing poverty across developing and least developed countries. While GATF's current projects are still in progress, it has reported tangible output results aligned with the partnership's institutional design comprising a roadmap of outcomes and impact results intended over the forthcoming years. Through an exhaustive desk-review of GATF's annual reports and a general-knowledge interview directed to GATF staff members, I argue that GATF's institutional design linked to the World Trade Organization's Trade Facilitation Agreement and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development at-tributes this partnership a significant potential to reap impact effectiveness. By analyzing GATF's institutional design features according to conceptualization perspectives on PPPs effectiveness, I found that GATF offers a suitable institu-tional design model to attain both external and policy implementation effectiveness. While publicly available infor-mation on GATF's structure and progress up to date support my findings, I stated the need for empirical assessments on GATF's performance after its delivery process. Overall, GATF offers a good institutional design model for PPPs aimed at enabling enticing business environments for harnessing trade and investment strategies to advance sustainable devel-opment projects across the world.

This article considers I. A. Bunin's poetic oeuvre from the point of view of title poetics in order to identify the main patterns and author's strategies in working with the title complex. The methodology is based on the correlation of the title with the text, subtext, and metatext of the poem, taking into account textual refinements. In Bunin's principle of working with the title complex, there is a noticeable striving for accuracy and at the same time for a metaphorical semantic comprehensiveness that includes existential, natural, and cultural constants. Thus, the main features of Bunin's poetics of titles are changes in the titles of one text, removal of titles and dedications, repetition of titles in two or more poems, combination of the theme and genre in a number of titles, and the addressing factor. In recurring titles, the researcher finds key images of Bunin's poetry that include him in the Russian poetic tradition. However, a tendency to modernism is also noticeable in Bunin's poetry in the titles of poems that contain Bunin's philosophical and poetical reflection. The titles of such poems refer to the theme of death and often contain the words "grave" / "tomb", but the text of the poem enters into an antinomic relationship with the title, i.e. a person belonging to the "world of art", culture, and tradition (myth and religious tradition) has already ascended over the world and is doomed to immortality. The removal of titles as a strong position in texts on political topics shifts the reader's attention from the temporary to the eternal and metahistorical, which is found in the text itself and clarifies the author's position.

There is a lot of debate in Pakistan on and about the poor performance of the government and the bureaucracy. The performance of the government is marred by the corrupt practices, inefficiencies and waste. The political leadership and bureaucracy both are publically called corrupt and stories appear on news, media channels every now and then of the corruption scandals, misuse of authority and wasteful working. We rank the lowest amongst the nations in terms of basic government services like education and healthcare. This paper aims to highlight the reasons of this poor performance and recommends a workable performance management program which can help the government in improving the performance of its various functions. It also gives an over view of the current practices of performance management system in the public sector of Pakistan and discusses briefly the history of performance management in the modern world. Most importantly we discuss the challenges we face while implementing a performance management system in government sector, what are the differences between a private sector performance management program and the problems we face when we implement it in public sector in a developing world specially in a country like Pakistan. The challenges become even more profound when we face a democracy where the political interference has destroyed the core of the bureaucratic structure. But all is not lost since many reforms over the past few decades put in place by successive governments have at-least paved the way for a more progressive performance management program which can help Pakistan deliver on its promise of becoming a great Islamic republic. The Islamic republic of Pakistan.

This article seeks to investigate art as an emblematic example of life as will to power, from the perspective of Friedrich Nietzsche. According to Nietzsche life is a constant creating and recreating without a pre-defined teleology. It is precisely this aspect that art expresses a more transparent way what life is therefore art is precisely the process of creation and recreation without a purpose beyond creation itself. The art from the perspective of the artist is always unfinished and so he continues to create, is as if the artist somehow would capture what life is, and reveal it in their art and in the creative process. The art besides being like everything else, moved by the will to power, to the extent that she herself is a constant drive by creating, reveals a very peculiar way the pathos that is life as will to power that always surpasses herself . Therefore, to realize the true artist against the current world how content and content as form, realizes the inverted world, and in this reversal look allows play with life, creating and transforming the current New. Furthermore, to the extent that the figures are contrasted by a necessary one photographer to support the existence, for the inversion of true reality is a reality in its many situations created. Criticized the values ​​exemplified by the action of the artist's conception of truth inaugurated by Socratic and Platonism, which in a way is based on a kind of deification of the rational concept. Our Philosopher explicit reversal of Platonism asserts that the truth-conceptual-rational metaphysics has less value than the irrationality of artistic pathos.

The term 'political will' is often conveniently used to explain the success or failure of any policy or programme. It has emerged as the "sine qua non of policy success which is never defined except by its absence" (Hammergren, 1998, p. 12). Therefore, a structured examination of the term is necessary to analyse social policy and programming. The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), enacted by India's United Progressive Alliance government in 2005, offers a compelling case to examine the role of 'political will' in the formulation of a major programme. The evolution of the MGNREGA, which has been described by the World Bank as the largest antipoverty state-run employment-generation scheme anywhere in the world (Dutta, Murgai, Ravallion, & van de Walle, 2014), depended significantly on leadership and political commitment in the legislature and the executive, as well as their coordination and substantive engagement with civil society, represented through non-governmental organisations and activists. We explore the complex power relations between the diverse range of actors involved in the MGNREGA, and gauge the role of leadership and political will in the formulation of the MGNREGA, as carried out by the United Progressive Alliance government between 2005 and 2014, in contrast to the manner in which it was reframed and retained by its successor dispensation, the National Democratic Alliance from 2014 onwards. We then examine the MGNREGA, utilising a framework which expands our understanding of political will as being contingent upon leadership at the individual, collective and societal levels (Hudson, Mcloughlin, Roche, & Marquette, 2018), thereby providing us with greater explanatory power.

The latest World Bank report for 2016 on the impact of climate change on poverty states that climate change could lead to a growth of extremely poor population to the extent that 100 million people might be pushed into poverty by 2030. The report emphasizes that climate change can have different impacts, in particular negative ones, on the poor, who are unprepared for climate shock waves, such as sea level rise or large-scale droughts. The poor possess fewer resources and receive less support from their families or through local communities, the financial system, and even through social security measures, which is why they do not have sufficient capacity to adapt to climate change. Specific population groups, such as women and children, are particularly vulnerable.Omly few theoreticians have dealt with the question of how to help poor countries and poor communities in certain countries to face climate change, while focusing specially on the gender dimension of poverty.The World Bank report also states that efforts to protect the poor should include better access to healthcare and social security measures, improved protection against floods, and development of crops that are more resilient to high temperatures, all for the purpose of preventing the worst possible impacts of climate change on the poor. However, it needs to be stressed that any adaptation to climate change has to incorporate the gender dimension of poverty.Therefore, this paper will provide only a small contribution to the analysis of the issues pertaining to the gender dimension of poverty and its relation to climate change adaptation.

The twentieth-century world order has been shaken and is being reinterpreted in different terms. The rise of China has been instrumental in such reshaping, which does not only affect the current global world order but also the region of South Asia, which has its own rising power—India. What are the choices of South Asian nations under the circumstances? This article seeks to ask. In this context, I choose to study Bangladesh. Bangladesh, the youngest South Asian nation, started its journey with a foreign policy assumption of its geographic limitation; that Bangladesh is locked by India on three sides with a small border with Myanmar and a southward opening towards the Bay of Bengal has made Bangladeshi experts call it an 'India-locked' nation. Despite such a pessimistic undertone, Bangladesh has emerged in the second decade of the twenty-first century as a country to be reckoned with. While I argue that for Bangladesh both India and China are of paramount significance, one must not forget that for both the countries, Bangladesh holds strategic significance not only due to its locational reality but also an array of other reasons. This article thus seeks to explore Bangladesh's strengths and challenges in responding to India and China's policies towards it and thus contribute to the understanding of the strategies of small powers towards big powers in a region. Certainly, in the light of a looming Asian century, this article also plans to chart the changing landscape of the larger international politics and concludes how an emergent South Asia and a small power like Bangladesh can play an instrumental role in it.

PurposeThe transportation system in any city is complex and evolving, shaped by various driving forces and uncertainties in the social, economic, technological, political and environmental situations. Its development and demands upon it cannot be projected by simply extrapolating past and current trends. This paper aims to present a foresight study examining the future of urban mobility, focusing on the dense Asian city-state of Singapore. The objective is to develop scenarios for the future of urban mobility, to facilitate future policy implementation by highlighting long term challenges and opportunities for transportation planning in cities.Design/methodology/approachTo create future scenarios, the authors first sought to identify key drivers of change through environmental scanning, expert interviews, focus group discussions and technology scanning. These drivers of change were subsequently used in a scenario planning workshop, organized to co-create alternative future visions for urban mobility 2040 with experts and local stakeholders.FindingsTwo scenarios emerged, called the Shared World and the Virtual World. For each scenario, the authors described the key features in terms of dominant transport modes for the movements of passengers and freight. Subsequently, the authors discussed possible implications of each scenario to the individual, society, industry and government.Originality/valueAs cities grow and develop, city and transport planners should not only address daily operational issues but also develop a well-informed, long-term understanding of the evolving mobility system to address challenges that lie beyond the five- or even ten-year horizon. By using scenario planning approach, the authors hope to prepare stakeholders for the uncertain futures that are continuously shaped by the decisions today.

Purpose
Making citizens able to monitor and evaluate public spending activities is a fundamental issue in public financial management literature. The purpose of this paper is to analyze whether fiscal transparency, measured by the Open Budget Index, has an effect on public spending performance, measured by the World Economic Forum's Global Competitiveness Report data.


Design/methodology/approach
Research methods rely on random-effects panel regression models on a country-level panel data set of 82 world countries observed in the 2008–2015 time interval.


Findings
Results show that the potential positive effects of fiscal transparency are mediated by the level of democracy of the country. In detail, in democratic countries, a higher degree of disclosure of fiscal information is correlated with a higher efficiency of government spending while, in non-democratic countries, fiscal transparency does not seem to provide any effect.


Social implications
The results suggest that fiscal transparency can be a powerful device where politicians can be held accountable for their actions, while it could fail to provide positive results where a strong and effective vertical accountability is missing.


Originality/value
The novelty of the paper is twofold. First, it provides new additional evidence about the positive effect that fiscal transparency has on public spending efficiency by advancing previous research on this topic (Porumbescu, 2017; Montes et al., 2019). Second, the paper investigates conceptually and empirically how the positive effect on public spending efficiency determined by fiscal transparency depends on the degree of democracy present in the institutional environment in which fiscal information disclosure is implemented.

Since the end of the Cold War, the world entered the era of economic interdependence and cooperation. In contemporary times, no country in the world can exist in isolation. After a long period of hostile relations and negative foreign policy postures towards each other, Pakistan and Russia have acknowledged the need for pragmatic yet friendly relations with different states, globally in general and regionally in particular. They have realised that bilateral cooperation is extremely necessary to achieve their national security and foreign policy objectives. Russia, realising its global power status and its renewed drive to regain its past glorified position in international affairs, has made big changes in its foreign policy. It has adopted a new holistic foreign policy orientation towards South Asia while abandoning the country-specific policy that it had in the past. Pakistan on the other hand, after many tests and trials, have come to realise that it cannot depend on a single country in particular (to achieve its national security and foreign policy objectives) and have to expand its list of countries on whom it can depend on for support and have good relations with. Over the last decade, Pakistan and Russia bilateral relationship have commenced on the path of improvement, with both countries entering into multiple deals of cooperation in the domains of military, politics and economics. It is high time that Pakistan and Russia realise and accept the realities of international relations, learn from their past and further build upon the positive developments to solidify their bilateral relations for mutual benefits and for the good of the entire region.