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Observers of Ethiopia's entry into export-oriented global value chains generally agree that social upgrading is crucial if these chains' largely female workforce is to reap the benefits of participation. They disagree, however, on the extent to which a 'business case' can be made to involve in this upgrading the managers who link frontline workers to international buyers. This article takes a novel approach to these questions by directly asking these managers and those who advise them on human resources how they understand the well-being of their frontline workers. Drawing on 37 qualitative semi-structured interviews, we find great variation in the extent to which such actors are interested in pursuing worker well-being and social upgrading beyond basic compliance. This is indeed due in part to the sectoral dynamics that have shaped managers' views of what constitutes a profitable labour regime but also by sociocultural factors that include managers' own national contexts, gender and class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigated whether the link between early pubertal timing and initiation of weekly alcohol use is mediated by changes in perceived parental alcohol-specific rule setting and changes in perceived proportion of drinkers in the peer group. Longitudinal data including 3 annual waves were used to estimate the hazard for adolescents to initiate drinking alcohol using Cox proportional hazard structural equation models in 1,286 Dutch adolescents (50.2% boys) 13-14 years old at baseline in 2008. Early pubertal timing increased the risk to initiate weekly alcohol use. However, this risk was entirely mediated by a large increase in the perceived proportion of drinkers in the peer group and a large decrease in the frequency of perceived alcohol-specific rules for early pubertal timers within a period of 1 year. There is no direct risk for early pubertal timers to initiate weekly drinking per se but an indirect one via changes in their social environments, that is, a large increase in the perceived proportion of drinkers in their peer group and parents becoming more lenient in their alcohol-specific rule setting. It is important to motivate parents not to relax their alcohol-specific rule setting over time, particularly parents of early pubertal timers.

In scientific literature, early pubertal timing emerges as a risk factor of adolescents' drinking, whereas alcohol-specific rules (the degree to which parents permit their children to consume alcohol in various situations) showed to protect against adolescents' drinking. This study investigated whether alcohol-specific rules mediate and/or moderate the effect that early pubertal and psychosocial timing (personal, relational, socio-institutional) has on adolescents' alcohol use. Mediation and moderation models were tested conducting ordinal logistic structural equation modeling in a cross-sectional sample of 1,893 Dutch adolescents (49% males), aged 13-15 years. Findings showed that early pubertal, relational and socio-institutional timers were at greater risk to initiate alcohol use and for heavy episodic drinking. Alcohol-specific rules more often mediated, rather than moderated, the effect of early timing on alcohol use. Alcohol-specific rules are mostly relaxed when adolescents mature, rather than reinforced, indicating that parents partly facilitate adolescents' drinking.

Introduction: Alcohol abstinence remains common among adults globally, although low and middle‐income countries are experiencing declines in abstention. The effect of alcohol policies on lifetime abstinence is poorly understood. The International Alcohol Control (IAC) policy index was developed to benchmark and monitor the uptake of effective alcohol policies and has shown strong associations with alcohol per capita consumption and drinking patterns. Uniquely, the index incorporates both policy 'stringency' and 'impact', reflecting policy implementation and enforcement, across effective policies. Here we assessed the association of the IAC policy index with lifetime abstinence in a diverse sample of jurisdictions. Methods: We conducted a cross‐sectional analysis of the relationship between the IAC policy index score, and its components, and lifetime abstinence among adults (15+ years) in 13 high and middle‐income jurisdictions. We examined the correlations for each component of the index and stringency and impact separately. Results: Overall, the total IAC policy index scores were positively correlated with lifetime abstinence (r = 0.76), as were both the stringency (r = 0.62) and impact (r = 0.82) scores. Marketing restrictions showed higher correlations with lifetime abstinence than other policy domains (r = 0.80), including restrictions on physical availability, pricing policies and drink‐driving prevention. Discussion and Conclusion: Our findings suggest that restricting alcohol marketing could be an important policy for the protection of alcohol abstention. The IAC policy index may be a useful tool to benchmark the performance of alcohol policy in supporting alcohol abstention in high and middle‐income countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]