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Background: Analyses of sensitivity of Global Food Security (FS) score to a key set of supply or demand factors often suggest population and water supply as being the most critical and on which policies tend to focus. To explore other policy options, we characterized the nexus between GFS and a set of supply or demand factors including population, agricultural and industrial water uses, agricultural publications (as a surrogate for investment in agricultural research and development (R&D)) and corruption perception index (CPI), to reveal opportunities for attaining enduring GFS., Results: We found that despite being the primary driver of demand for food, population showed no significant correlation with FS scores. Similarly, agricultural water use was poorly correlated with GFS scores, except in countries where evaporation exceeds precipitation and irrigation is significant. However, FS had a strong positive association with industrial water use as a surrogate for overall industrialization. Recent expansions in cultivated land area failed to yield concomitant improvements in FS score since such expansions have been mostly into marginal lands with low productivity and thus barely compensated for lands retired from cropping in several developed economies. However, FS was positively associated with agricultural R&D investments, as it was with the CPI scores. The apparent and relative strengths of these drivers on FS outcome amongst countries were in the order: industrial water-use ≈ publication rate ≈ corruption perception ≫ agricultural water use > population., Conclusions: We suggest that to enshrine enduring food security, policies should prioritize (1) increased R&D investments that address farmer needs and (2) governance mechanisms that promote accountability in both research and production value chains. © 2018 Society of Chemical Industry., (© 2018 Society of Chemical Industry.)

An undergraduate course in development economics presents an ideal opportunity to introduce students to the importance of gender differences in economic outcomes. The authors of this article argue that a systematic integration of gender into development economics courses based on standard textbooks is feasible and desirable. They provide a gendered narrative of how to engender a development economics course in the Global North using as examples topics that are commonly taught and show how gender-aware scholarly articles, classroom activities, and assignments can complement a course based on a standard textbook or set of articles. They engender three main sections of a prototype development economics course: meanings and measures of economic development; strategies for economic development; and salient issues in development; and they add a forward-looking section on creating equitable development.

Background: Non-degradable and persistent nature of Cadmium (Cd) poses high toxicity to human, plants and animals. Several industrial processes generated wastes are the main anthropogenic pathway through which Cd enters into the environment. Although, World Health Organization (WHO) has set the limit of Cd in drinking water is 0.005 mg L-1, the industrial activities release much higher concentrations of metal ions to the water stream than the prescribed limits, which leads to the increasing health hazards and environmental pollution., Objective: To address this issue, one of the major applicable solutions is the treatment or purification of contaminated water and effluents. The implantation of wastewater treatment systems aims to minimize environmental impacts, but ultimately generates waste materials, such as sewage sludge, which must be properly recycled., Method: In this review, we focus on the research efforts being made towards the removal of Cd (II) from waste waters using biological means with a special emphasis on the microorganism and agricultural based biosorbents., Results: Mechanistic pathway towards removal of Cd (II) ions from the wastewater, efficiency of the adsorbents and the factors affecting the process have been studied with specific examples. Also the recent patents related to this area have been taken into considerations to understand applicability of microorganism and agricultural based biosorbents., Conclusion: This overview presents various scientific reports towards low-cost microorganism and agricultural based biosorbents for efficient removal of Cd (II) by producing less toxic waste and the future perspective of the process., (Copyright© Bentham Science Publishers; For any queries, please email at epub@benthamscience.org.)

This paper introduces convergent innovation (CI) as a form of meta-innovation-an innovation in the way we innovate. CI integrates human and economic development outcomes, through behavioral and ecosystem transformation at scale, for sustainable prosperity and affordable universal health care within a whole-of-society paradigm. To this end, CI combines technological and social innovation (including organizational, social process, financial, and institutional), with a special focus on the most underserved populations. CI takes a modular approach that convenes around roadmaps for real world change-a portfolio of loosely coupled complementary partners from the business community, civil society, and the public sector. Roadmaps serve as collaborative platforms for focused, achievable, and time-bound projects to provide scalable, sustainable, and resilient solutions to complex challenges, with benefits both to participating partners and to society. In this paper, we first briefly review the literature on technological innovation that sets the foundations of CI and motivates its feasibility. We then describe CI, its building blocks, and enabling conditions for deployment and scaling up, illustrating its operational forms through examples of existing CI-sensitive innovation., (© 2014 The New York Academy of Sciences.)

"We find that a nation's urban population percentage increases with GDP per capita; industrialization; export orientation; and possibly, foreign assistance. It decreases with the importance of agriculture. Industrialization and agricultural importance have the same implications for the concentration of urban population in cities with 100,000+ population as for the urban percentage. Greater export orientation reduces such concentration. Finally, GDP per capita, population, and export orientation reduce primacy. Political factors, such as whether a country's largest city is also its capital, affect primacy. Our results do not seem to imply that developing-country urbanization today differs fundamentally from urbanization in the past.", (excerpt)

Vizcaya was originally the private winter residence of industrialist James Deering and in the course of the last century has known many identities. In Vizcaya's recent process to refresh our mission and vision, we wondered: What should the role of James Deering be in our new vision? Why does he matter? Why does Vizcaya matter? In exploring Vizcaya's two founding stories -- the story of the founding of the estate and the story of the museum -- we envision Deering as a catalyst that enables us to embrace stories of people, place, preservation and innovation through the past, present and future. Through this process, Vizcaya has redefined its role which is to inspire cultural vitality and environmental sustainability and to establish its relevance as a museum in the urban core of twenty-first-century Miami.

In case of that human civilization was viewed as an integrated organism, the Periodic Table of the Civilizations (PTOC in short) has been formulated and recommended based on the development level and periodicity of core elements of human civilization. It divides the frontier process of the human civilization from the birth of humankind to the end of twenty-first century into 4 periods and 16 stages, and in which four periods include that of primitive culture, agricultural civilization, industrial civilization and knowledge civilization orderly, and each period includes four stages, that is, start, developing, maturing and transition stages sequentially. There are three approaches for the arrangements of the PTOC, that is, simple, vertical and horizontal tables. The big period of earth civilization refers to that from the primitive culture to the knowledge civilization, and then big period of space civilization will begin with the astronautic civilization. The first modernization witnesses the great changes and transformation from the traditional agricultural to the modern industrial civilization, and then second modernization from the modern industrial to the higher modern knowledge civilization. The periodic table, coordinate system and roadmap of human civilization and world modernization have been formulated to describe the relationship between them.

As a critique of the popular perspective on China's rural reform centered on microinstitutional problems of collective farming such as work incentive and monitoring, this paper places an alternative emphasis on the distinct organizational characteristics of the peasant family in production, distribution, and welfare. What the Chinese state saw in family-based peasantry was not a typical market-oriented private economy operating mainly in pursuit of short term profits, but a multipurpose, morally governed unit in which the rural population maintains stable work relations, pursues diverse entrepreneurial activities, and satisfies basic subsistence needs; i.e., a organizational unit which could take over most of the social and economic functions of the pre-reform collective. In a sense, China's rural decollectivization has been a process of deceptively transferring the burden of absorbing and supporting the huge rural surplus labor to individual peasant families for whose economic activities the state is not directly responsible.

"This study investigates labor mobility in Ecuador as a function of the socioeconomic structure of places and personal attributes of migrants and circulators (short-term movers).... Particular attention is given to the role of agrarian change in altering established migration and circulation patterns." The author finds that "circulation may significantly alter family organization and the role of women in many Ecuadorian communities.", (excerpt)

The author analyzes the spatial distribution and the rapid growth rate of India's scheduled caste population since 1971 and finds that "there are wide regional disparities in their rates of population growth. Areas with relatively high growth rates are associated with (i) accelerated process of urbanisation and industrialisation, (ii) expansion in mining activity, and (iii) intensification and commercialisation of agricultural development based on irrigation. By contrast, areas experiencing low rates of growth are associated with (i) continuing high mortality rate, and (ii) net out-migration arising from scarcity of resources, acute poverty and subjection to deprivations....", (excerpt)

The structure of farm families in an industrializing rural area in west-central Taiwan is explored using data for 96 households in Hsiu-Shui district. The results suggest that despite modernization and social change, "the large family ideal still persists and expresses itself as a compartmental family which offers both the individual freedom of a nuclear family and the support and security of a large extended family.", (excerpt)

"The purpose of this study is to find out the trend of sex ratio variation in [the Republic of] Korea. The data...were derived from the government publications including the Population and Housing Census Reports covering the period of 1960-1985 and the Korea Urbanic Year Book, 1985. The major findings of the study are summarized as follows: The average sex ratio in all age groups is 100.17-101.44 from 1960 through 1980. Sex ratio imbalance was most severe in 1960 due to the Korean War." Sex ratios are compared among urban and rural areas and for industrialized and agricultural areas. (SUMMARY IN ENG), (excerpt)

In this article, the author presents a truer picture than economic historians have previously had of the economies of Tokugawa Japan, and Britain during the Industrial Revolution. Though substantially different, both societies were prosperous compared to most of the rest of the world. Japan's economic success began in the Tokugawa period (1603-1867), an era marked by rising affluence, flourishing commerce, and peace. Tokugawa prosperity rested upon a productive agricultural sector. Domestic trade also occurred through the shipments of large bulk commodities such as rice on both western and eastern routes off the coasts of the Sea of Japan and the Pacific. Commercial establishments were not heavily taxed, and gave merchants productivity incentives. Large financial houses had branches throughout Japan and small and large retail concerns proliferated. Private urban firms owned gigantic warehouses for storage of consumer goods. Japan's Tokugawa period helped build the foundation for that nation's current economic prosperity. Great Britain's Industrial Revolution (1780-1860), included a productive agricultural sector where better crop yields were created with less labor (freeing workers for other occupations), ready access to coal supplies that fueled factories, access to plentiful international supplies of cotton--the vital raw material for a fast growing textile industry, and entrepreneurship and innovation. Government also played an important role in the Industrial Revolution through guaranteeing private property rights, institutionalizing a non-arbitrary or confiscatory tax system, and moving toward free trade. Increases in international trade brought food imports and also provided factory workers disposable income that was not previously available to farm laborers. The British Industrial Revolution significantly reduced poverty. The author concludes that, while the study of history has a civic function, it is imperative that future citizens in a republic understand economics, especially the reasons why some nations became rich and others remained poor.

It is commonly assumed that environmentalism harms national economies because environmental regulations constrain economic activity and create incentives for firms to move production and investment to other countries. We point out that global environmentalism involves large-scale institutional changes that: (1) encourage new kinds of economic activity and (2) reconstruct economic value such that environmental protection is rewarded in the market. We employ cross-national panel analyses to examine the effects of national environmentalism on economic growth, trade, industry and investment. We find that pro-environmental countries fare better in terms of economic growth, investment and size of the industrial and service sectors. We find no impact of environmentalism on foreign investment and trade. Firms and investment do not appear to be fleeing countries with strong environmental standards. (Contains 4 tables and 24 notes.)

This study reexamines the relationship between economic globalization and manufacturing employment in affluent democracies. After reviewing past research, including the well-supported Rowthorn model, we propose a differentiation-saturation model that theorizes that globalization has a curvilinear relationship with manufacturing employment. Using two different techniques, we analyze the most comprehensive sample of 18 affluent democracies from 1960-2001. We examine 12 globalization measures and provide the first analysis of the curvilinear relationship between globalization and manufacturing employment. We find that some aspects of globalization have linear effects on manufacturing employment, most of which are positive. We find more evidence, however, that globalization has a curvilinear, inverted U-shaped relationship with manufacturing employment. The evidence for the Rowthorn model is mixed. GDP per capita and its square do not have robust effects, but agricultural employment is one of the most important causes. Including globalization in the model weakens the evidence for the Rowthorn model. There is some evidence that globalization has different effects across different varieties of capitalism, regions and historical periods. Ultimately, our analyses partially support both the Rowthorn model and our differentiation-saturation model. (Contains 2 figures, 6 tables and 13 notes.)