Suchergebnisse

The spatial impact of socioeconomic determinants on the macro-level early developmental vulnerability of children was analyzed in this paper using Local Government Areas (LGAs) as samples. Five domains of developmental outcomes: physical, social, emotional, language and cognitive, and communication have been addressed as ordinal outcomes, and fitted by the proportional odds model. Areas with a high percentage of low-income, welfare dependent and single parent families significantly increased the proportion of vulnerable children in all five domains. Other factors that significantly affect some aspects of developmental vulnerability in children are participation of women in the labor market, availability of home Internet and unemployment rate in the locality. The macro-level results match with previous micro-level assessments showing the relationship between household socioeconomic features and childhood vulnerability.

Both research and development (R&D) and military expenditure are pivotal areas for any country's economy. However, most countries tend to spend more on military because of global insecurity and power politics. Nevertheless, this study shows the merit of R&D investment and how it contributes to the national human capital. An analysis was undertaken on the gap between R&D and military expenditure considering the Human Development Index (HDI) and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of 76 countries for a period of 15 years (2000–2014). Mixed effect models were applied to adjust the effect of six different continents. The results showed that HDI has a positive bi-directional significant relationship with higher R&D investment. National spending on R&D builds human capital, which in turn contributes to public development over the years, unlike military expenditure that only marginally contributes towards GDP and makes no contribution to HDI.