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The city of Agra, renowned worldwide as the city of the Taj, is the abode of many of India's most well-known architectural and historical marvels. With the advent of modern industry and urban expansion, these remnants of India's rich heritage, are getting severely impacted. The rise of environmentalist awareness in India, as a reaction to the adverse effects of these polluting industries and increasing encroachment, also came to the rescue of India's monuments, leading to the landmark establishment of the Taj Trapezium zone (TTZ). This paper attempts to provide a holistic picture of the measures taken hitherto with the establishment of the TTZ, its objectives, and the successes or misses of the intervening Government initiatives. The paper also aims to offer suggestions for further initiatives that need to be undertaken, in order to protect and preserve these monuments from the negative impact of pollution and encroachment.

Taxation is accepted as a fact of modern life, despite recurring political conflict over the nature and direction of fiscal policies. Most financiers regard obligations issued by the state as a safe investment option. Neither taxation nor state obligations were taken for granted during much of the history of public finance, however, at least not before the early 1800s. The 'tax state' developed in fits and starts, driven by the exigencies of warfare, which provided the main rationale for raising state income. Although wartime fiscal innovations eventually facilitated the rise of an efficient military state, the options available for implementing such improvements and preferences for specific fiscal or financial instruments varied greatly across early modern states. Focusing on the 'long' eighteenth century, this introduction presents a framework for assessing these differences and introduces the other articles in this special issue.

The environmental impacts caused by construction waste have attracted increasing attention in recent years. The effective management of construction waste is essential in order to reduce negative environmental influences. Construction waste management (CWM) can be viewed as a complex adaptive system, as it involves not only various factors (e.g., social, economic, and environmental), but also different stakeholders (such as developers, contractors, designers, and governmental departments) simultaneously. System dynamics (SD) and agent-based modeling (ABM) are the two most popular approaches to deal with the complexity in CWM systems. However, the two approaches have their own advantages and drawbacks. The aim of this research is to conduct a comprehensive review and develop a novel model for combining the advantages of both SD and ABM. The research findings revealed that two options can be considered when combining SD with ABM ; the two options are discussed.

Wind power is the world&rsquo ; s fastest-growing energy source. More power can be generated from wind energy through the use of new wind machine designs and techniques. The objective of the present work is to encourage people and governments to develop wind energy-based power plants to achieve sustainable energy infrastructures, especially in developing countries. In this paper, a feasibility study of a 100 MW grid-connected wind farm is conducted for five different cities of Saudi Arabia (KSA). The results indicate that the proposed power plant is feasible both technically and economically. All sites are found to be within the profitable range with Dhahran being the most feasible site among the others for the installation of the wind farm. A sensitivity analysis has also been carried out to find out the effects of different incentives on the payback period of the project.

A state-owned enterprise (SOE) is a mechanism by which market stability is achieved through government intervention. As economic freedom intensifies, most SOEs still have a rigid personnel system, unsound financial structure, and high product costs, along with poor management and operating losses, making them financial burdens. This study uses grey relational analysis and a Boston Consulting Group matrix to develop a sustainable management and development model for enterprises. The 13 business units of the Taiwan Sugar Corporation (Tainan, Taiwan) created through diversification were evaluated to determine if they have led to new competitiveness. The findings reveal that only two of the business units&mdash ; land development and property management&mdash ; have justified their operations, while the other 11 business units have brought no benefits to the country. Overall, diversification has created a greater burden for the country.

China has one of the most serious air quality conditions in the world, with the main energy consumption and air pollution emissions coming from its industrial sector. Since 2010, the Chinese government has strengthened the governance requirements for industrial sector emissions. This study uses emission treatment as a new input on the basis of past literature, and employs the dynamic SBM model to evaluate the energy and emission-reduction efficiencies of the country&rsquo ; s industrial sector from 2011 to 2015. The study finds that the improvement in industrial sector efficiency is not only due to the optimization of the energy consumption structure and reduction of energy intensity, but also from investing inemission treatment methods that help cut emissions as an undesirable output. The end result is a positive effect on the improvement and sustainability of energy and emission-reduction efficiencies.

This chapter explores the role of parliaments and the judiciary in shaping evidence use in health policy making. Most analyses of the role of scientific evidence focus on the executive, i.e. national governments and ministries of health, as the key state actors in health policy and health system governance. This chapter shifts attention to the other two powers within the state, the legislative and the judiciary. Using the examples analysed in this book the chapter examines how parliaments can use evidence to inform legislative processes and to hold governments to account, although there are substantial differences between countries and political systems. However, there was little suggestion that such approaches were undertaken systematically. In cases in which policies are brought to court, judges may have to deal with scientific evidence within a country's legal and constitutional framework, again with significant differences between national legal practices.

The ASEAN development gap is the disparity that exists between the ASEAN 6 and CLMV groups. The challenge for ASEAN's integration isthat the increasingly globalized world and current community-building process of ASEAN could turn the region into the included and the non-include, unless ASEAN can finds appropriate approaches to sustainable bridging the crucial development gaps among itself. Such possibility would threaten the stability of ASEAN from within rather than from outside. This paper provides the discussion on the income gap, the infrastructure gap, trade gap and the institutional gap in order to understand possible outcomes and on what has to be prioritized in the community-building process of ASEAN. Lastly, this paper focuses on regional institution-building and caring far the most vulnerable as the new ASEAN way to bridging the development gaps and for a sustainable ASEAN community in the future.

The rat is one of the most widely used laboratory animal species. Therefore development of mathematical models aimed to analyze electromechanical coupling in the rat myocardium is a matter of top interest. We have developed a novel model of excitation-contraction coupling in the rat cardiomyocyte. This model combines equations from the Pandit electrophysiological model and Hinch model of calcium handling with equations describing myofilament mechanical activity from the 'Ekaterinburg-Oxford' mathematical model. The model reproduces both fast and slow responses to mechanical interventions in rat myocardium. © 2018 Creative Commons Attribution. ; Russian Foundation for Basic Research, RFBR: 18-01-00059 ; The work is performed in the frameworks of IIP UrB RAS projects (Nos. AAAA-A18-118020590031-8, АААА-А18-118020590134-6), and supported by RFBR (No. 18-01-00059), by Act 211 Government of the Russian Federation, contract No. 02.A03.21.0006.

In the effort of improving the human resource (HR) quality through employee commitment, sustainable guidance is required, both the introduction of organizational culture values and also the application of work ethic (especially Islamic work ethics) to the employees involved, including in the development of government of Aceh which becomes a Measurement the success of Islamic sharia enforcement in the work environment, where Aceh is the first Areas in Indonesia that uphold the principles of sharia in the community order. The study is focused on measuring Organizational Citizenship Behavior (OCB) by using organizational commitment as mediation factors. Islamic work ethics variable has the most effect of dominant variable on organizational commitment of employees at government of Aceh and simultaneous verification shows that Islam work ethics and organizational culture simultaneously have positive and significant effects on organizational commitment of employees at government of Aceh.

Since the early 2000s, the "local turn" has thoroughly transformed the field of peacebuilding. The European Union (EU) policy discourse on peacebuilding has also aligned with this trend, with an increasing number of EU policy statements insisting on the importance of "the local." However, most studies on EU peacebuilding still adopt a top-down approach and focus on institutions, capabilities, and decision-making at the EU level. This special issue contributes to the literature by focusing on bottom-up and local dynamics of EU peacebuilding. After outlining the rationale and the scope of the special issue, this article discusses the local turn in international peacebuilding and identifies several interrelated concepts relevant to theorizing the role of the local, specifically those of effectiveness, ownership, and resistance. In the conclusion, we summarize the key contributions of this special issue and suggest some avenues for further research.

Assessments of party decline and decline of traditional forms of political participation often rely on the argument of party membership decline. Most studies analysing trends in party membership over time focus on aggregate country-level data at a few points in time. While they allow grasping general membership trends, they are not without shortcomings. This article presents the MAPP dataset related to the MAPP project (Members and Activists of Political Parties). The dataset makes a large amount of data on party membership available to the larger public. The dataset provides 6,307 party membership data observations (M) covering 397 parties in 31 countries, mostly between 1945 and 2014. The article discusses the existing literature and data on party membership trends, how membership trends have been assessed so far, and the potential added value of the MAPP dataset. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/published

The behaviour of incumbent energy companies is critical for a transition to a sustainable energy system. We address the recent call for closer conceptualisation of power and agency within transition studies by combining concepts of strategic action fields (Fligstein and McAdam, 2012) and the flat-ontology perspective of arenas of development (Jørgensen, 2012) to identify potential ruptures emerging on the micro scale in the field of sustainable energy. We investigate how new actor configurations in new experimental arenas open field rules for renegotiation. We provide a long-term analysis on how traditional energy field rules have emerged, how two of the most powerful energy companies in Finland have responded to the emergence of sustainable energy and how new forms of collaborations are emerging in the space created by new arenas of development that create ruptures within the incumbent energy coalition. ; Peer reviewed

Based on the analysis of the powers of the Russian Federation and its subjects in the scientific and technical sphere, the article shows that despite the constitutional consolidation of the sphere of science as joint powers of the regions and the federal center, in fact, in most cases, the development of science is exclusively the task of the Russian Federation. Therefore, the expenditures of the federal budget determine the direction of financing and development of science. The paper analyzes both the dynamics of the main parameters of financing within the program budget and the first major results obtained under the new conditions in 2013-2016. It is shown that the efficiency of expenditures on science has significantly increased. However, a separate analysis is required both for the quality of the obtained scientific results and the results of institutional reforms in the sector of research and development. ; peer-reviewed

Despite the increasing recognition of household food insecurity as a policy issue, there is currently no routine measurement of food insecurity in the UK. There is nothing to suggest that Government will address this in the near future for all parts of the UK. In which case, policy makers and campaigners might instead seek out consistent and robust measures of the population-level factors which are known to contribute to food insecurity. However, no systematic measures exist, meaning that resources may not be targeted at those areas most in need. This paper presents the first objective estimate of high population-level risk of household food insecurity in English neighbourhoods (4.09% of the population, 95%CI 4.08-4.10) using public data. Estimated geographic distribution of factors contributing to household food insecurity is customisable to local pressures and is adaptable to settings outside of England.