Suchergebnisse

This article aims to analyze the effect of formal and informal financing on the growth of cottage industry firms in village Islampur in Swat one of the districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Pakistan. Primary data were collected through Focused Group Discussions (FGD) and a total of 208 cottage industry firms were surveyed. Robust Regression techniques were employed to analyze the data. The results show that informal financing has a higher impact than formal financing on the growth of the small firms in the study area. There is a tendency for informal borrowing among the small size firms' owners due to the fact that access to formal sources is hindered by a multitude of factors including high interest rate, complex application procedure, and demand for a collateral among others. On the contrary, we find that in case of large size firms, formal financing has a significant influence on firms' growth for cottage industry. Moreover, in co‐financing where the ratio of informal is greater than formal financing has a significant positive effect on the firm's growth. The findings of the study have implications for devising loan policies of the financial institutions to take into account these factors. The financial institutions need to come up with packages that meets the need of the small and medium enterprises.

There is a compelling and pressing need to better understand the temporal dynamics of public sentiment towards COVID-19 vaccines in the US on a national and state-wise level for facilitating appropriate public policy applications. Our analysis of social media data from early February and late March 2021 shows that, despite the overall strength of positive sentiment and despite the increasing numbers of Americans being fully vaccinated, negative sentiment towards COVID-19 vaccines still persists among segments of people who are hesitant towards the vaccine. In this study, we perform sentiment analytics on vaccine tweets, monitor changes in public sentiment over time, contrast vaccination sentiment scores with actual vaccination data from the US CDC and the Household Pulse Survey (HPS), explore the influence of maturity of Twitter user-accounts and generate geographic mapping of tweet sentiments. We observe that fear sentiment remained unchanged in populous states, whereas trust sentiment declined slightly in these same states. Changes in sentiments were more notable among less populous states in the central sections of the US. Furthermore, we leverage the emotion polarity based Public Sentiment Scenarios (PSS) framework, which was developed for COVID-19 sentiment analytics, to systematically posit implications for public policy processes with the aim of improving the positioning, messaging, and administration of vaccines. These insights are expected to contribute to policies that can expedite the vaccination program and move the nation closer to the cherished herd immunity goal.

Objective Child abuse is one of the major challenges for health care providers. This study was conducted to determine the burden of child abuse (physical & emotional) and the factors associated with it in an urban city of Pakistan. Methods This cross-sectional study was conducted in primary care clinics affiliated with a tertiary care hospital in Karachi, Pakistan between March to December 2010. Mothers with children aged between 6 and 12 years were included in the study. Those mothers' suffering from any acute illness like high grade fever, were excluded. A total of 412 mothers were recruited through consecutive sampling and written informed consent was taken. A pre-tested questionnaire was used to seek information about child abuse. Data was analyzed using SPSS version 19 and multivariable logistic regression was used to identify the factors (age, gender of child, family structure, educational status of parents, and mother's perception of her home environment) associated with child abuse. Findings Of the total 412 mothers, final analysis was conducted on 379 mothers. In all, 32.5% of children had been abused, 25.5% physically and 17.9% emotionally. Abuse was reported more among children whose mothers had minimal or no schooling (P=0.02), who were abused by their husbands (P<0.001), not satisfied with their marital life (P<0.001), and stressful home environment (P=0.02). In the multivariate analysis, the factors found to be independently associated with child abuse were mothers abused by their husbands (AOR=4.2; 95%CI: 2.2–7.9) and child being a girl (AOR=8.7; 95%CI: 4.5–16.8). Conclusion The prevention of child abuse can be achieved through comprehensive, multifaceted and integrated approaches requiring joint efforts by the government, policy makers, stake holders, social workers, educationists, and public health practitioners.

There is a compelling and pressing need to better understand the temporal dynamics of public sentiment towards COVID-19 vaccines in the US on a national and state-wise level for facilitating appropriate public policy applications. Our analysis of social media data from early February and late March 2021 shows that, despite the overall strength of positive sentiment and despite the increasing numbers of Americans being fully vaccinated, negative sentiment towards COVID-19 vaccines still persists among segments of people who are hesitant towards the vaccine. In this study, we perform sentiment analytics on vaccine tweets, monitor changes in public sentiment over time, contrast vaccination sentiment scores with actual vaccination data from the US CDC and the Household Pulse Survey (HPS), explore the influence of maturity of Twitter user-accounts and generate geographic mapping of tweet sentiments. We observe that fear sentiment remained unchanged in populous states, whereas trust sentiment declined slightly in these same states. Changes in sentiments were more notable among less populous states in the central sections of the US. Furthermore, we leverage the emotion polarity based Public Sentiment Scenarios (PSS) framework, which was developed for COVID-19 sentiment analytics, to systematically posit implications for public policy processes with the aim of improving the positioning, messaging, and administration of vaccines. These insights are expected to contribute to policies that can expedite the vaccination program and move the nation closer to the cherished herd immunity goal.