The contribution of cocoa to the economies of countries, especially producing countries cannot be understated. However, volatility in the prices of commodities affect all stakeholders in the productio...

This study investigates the professional integration of young applied statistics graduates in Algeria using the Cox proportional hazards model. Analyzing time-to-employment duration, the study identif...

The K-12 curriculum was implemented in the Philippines in 2013 and took effect in 2015. Despite the additional 2 years of secondary education, recent studies show a decline in returns to higher educat...

This study examines the economic and geopolitical determinants of Indonesia’s defense expenditure from 1984 to 2022 using the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model to capture both short-term and long-term dynamics. Recognizing the contextual relevance of Indonesia’s Total People’s Defense and Security System (SISHANKAMRATA), the analysis relies on conventional military expenditure data (% of GDP) due to the absence of consolidated multi-ministerial records. The results show that in the short run, defense spending is highly sensitive to macroeconomic shocks: inflation, exchange rate volatility, and foreign direct investment exert negative effects, while debt, trade openness, and regional military expenditure strengthen budgetary allocations. In the long run, macroeconomic fundamentals (debt, growth, inflation, and foreign investment) together with neighboring countries’ military spending drive defense expenditure, whereas regional average spending has a negative effect and U.S. military expenditure does not show a structural impact. These findings underscore the dual pressures of fiscal fragility and regional security competition in shaping Indonesia’s defense budget. Policy implications highlight the importance of inflation-adjusted and exchange rate–resilient budgeting, sustainable financing mechanisms such as defense bonds or a Defense Sovereign Wealth Fund (D-SWF), and deeper ASEAN defense cooperation to balance security needs with fiscal discipline. This study contributes a macro-level perspective on defense economics under conditions of institutional fragmentation, offering a framework for future comparative and panel-based research across decentralized security systems.

How does support for civil liberties prevail in times of external threat? Simultaneously, how does internal polarisation affect how tightly citizens hold to these liberties? We argue citizens may follow partisanship in evaluating foreign threats, supporting erosion of liberties if co-partisans advocate it in favour of national security. We conduct a survey experiment on a representative sample of 3281 US citizens, treating them with vignettes of potential conflict with China attributed to randomly varying partisanship. We interact such treatments with respondents’ own partisanship, then measure support for various civil liberties. Our findings yield mixed results and we are unable to decisively demonstrate that co-partisans are better at encouraging the surrender of civil liberties. This is congruent with other recent research that also shows partisan polarisation may neither lighten nor worsen in times of external threat.

Tuberculosis (TB) represents a major threat to global health security and is currently the world most deadly infectious disease. TB is noted to affect people of all age groups and exposure to the disease has been shown to exhibit variation in the risk of infection across different factors. This study was therefore carried out to identify possible disease associations of some risk factors in relation to time until onset of TB among TB infected individuals in the Bolgatanga Municipality of the Upper East Region of Ghana. To this end, secondary data on time until onset of TB was obtained from the Bolgatanga Regional Hospital of the Upper East Region of Ghana and used for statistical analysis. In order to obtain appropriate underlying disease associations, the Bayesian approach to the modelling of survival time was employed in the statistical analyses. Thus, different parametric models including; skew normal, lognormal, shifted lognormal, exponential, Weibull and Fréchet models were fitted to the TB data within the Bayesian framework. The Weibull was the overall best fitted model. Based on the estimation results of the Bayesian Weibull regression model; individuals with no education, individuals with diabetes and males were identified as high-risk groups with shorter time frame for the onset of TB in the Bolgatanga Municipality. The study was concluded by indicating the need for Ghana Health Service to institute targeted interventions aimed at preventing and controlling the TB with special emphasis to the high-risk groups in the Bolgatanga Municipality.

Remittances from Kerala’s migrant workers and professionals constitute a vital financial inflow, surpassing their relative significance in most other Indian states. With public debt nearing 60 % of NS...

This study examined GDP per Capita, military expenditure, trade openness capital formation, inflation and unemployment as determinants of political instability in ECOWAS from 1991 to 2022. Four countr...

The need for safety is one of the basic human needs. States implement different protective policies to fulfil the task of granting safety to their citizens. Aim of the present study conducted online o...

Research on representation and responsiveness is based on the idea that voters have concerns about certain policy problems and that representatives respond to these concerns with concrete policy outpu...