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The global economy in recent decades has experienced frequent shocks. Many regions must improve their competitiveness and value-added to deal with this. One of them is in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), where a rise in agricultural value-added (AVA) can produce more jobs than in other sectors. It is necessary to consider increasing AVA in the MENA region. Hence, the aim of this study is identifying the determinant factors of AVA in the MENA region. We employed 13 countries in the MENA region as samples in this study. The study's data spans 45 years, from 1975 to 2019. Static panel data regression analysis was employed in this study. AVA can growth by increasing the irrigated land, credit, and human capital. Meanwhile, growing inflation and economic globalization will reduce AVA. Therefore, we recommend that countries in the MENA region have to increase irrigation infrastructure, expand agricultural credit availability, encourage farmers to get a good education, improve research and development, control inflation, and find the best way to implement economic globalization.

The economic-financial crime is based on three main pillars, namely the underground economy, corruption and money laundering. The underground economy has negative connotations that include a wide area of coverage. On the other hand, corruption undermines democratic governance and the rule of law, negatively affecting, along with money laundering, economic development, representing a major impediment to economic growth in any economy. In the following we will refer to theoretical approaches of the specialized literature regarding the main categories of determinants - economic, political and behavioral of the economic-financial crime. We aim to carry out a theoretical analysis of the factors that have the capacity to define the economic-financial crime, so that later we can continue the research by studying the real effects in the society of the phenomenon of the economic-financial crime. The studies in question will want to be established as a basis for understanding the phenomenon and we will propose concrete solutions to combat it, aiming at limiting it and the adverse effects in the economy and society. The use of the methodology of investigating the specialized literature, followed by the analysis and synthesis of the data, allowed us to group the determining factors of the economic-financial crime into three major categories, namely the economic, the political and the behavioral ones, aspects detailed in the article. If the economic factors can be somehow standardized for different types of economies, the political and the behavioral ones are characterized by certain particularities that manifest themselves differently, having a specific evolution according to a certain context. The purpose of identifying and classifying the determining factors is to increase the capacity to 'diagnose' the national economy, to better understand the phenomenon of economic-financial crime, so that later it can provide specialized technical support within the reach of the decision-makers in order to act as effectively as possible in combating it. In the hope of creating a foundation for the study and understanding the complexity and dynamism of the economic-financial crime phenomenon, the present article proposes to bring attention to the possible causes, without pretending to exhaust them, constituting a challenge for new studies in order to sensitize the institutions enabled in its fight to act proportional to its magnitude and complexity.

An occupational incorporation event occurred at the Radioactive Waste Treatment and Disposal Facility in December 2013 at Püspökszilágy, Hungary. Internal contamination due to 241Am was discovered by a regular routine whole body counting measurement at the Centre for Energy Research, Hungarian Academy of Sciences. After that, a whole body counter was calibrated for an organ counting geometry. For preliminary calibration, a home-made MIX-D chest phantom was applied simulating uniform lung activity distribution by 241Am point sources located in different positions within the lung volume of the phantom. In order to carry out a more precise calibration, a Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) chest phantom was provided by the International Atomic Energy Agency. For counting efficiency over the lungs, values of 0.46±0.19 and 0.55±0.07 cps kBq-1 were obtained for the MIX-D and the LLNL phantom, respectively; thus, the results are in good agreement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One way of studying the risk to human health of low-level radiation exposure is to make biological experiments on living cell cultures.Two 210Po α-particle emitting devices, with 0.5 and 100 MBq activity, were designed and constructed to perform such experiments irradiating monolayers of cells. Estimates of dose rate at the cell surface were obtained from measurements by a PIPS α-particle spectrometer and from calculations by the SRIM 2000, Monte Carlo charged particle transport code. Particle fluence area distributions were measured by solid state nuclear track detectors. The design and dosimetric characterisation of the devices are discussed. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]