Volume 14, Issue 1

The study modelled and investigated the determinants of infant birth weight by considering maternal and infant factors as predictors. Monthly data spanning for a period of 37 months were obtained from the Navrongo Health Research Centre of the Navrongo Municipality of the Upper East region of Ghana. In modelling the birth weight of infants, the Tweedie regression model and its counterparts of exponential families (Gaussian, Gamma and inverse Gaussian) of distribution were developed. The performances of these models were evaluated using the Akaike Information Criterion. Based on the Akaike Information Criterion, the Tweedie regression model showed superiority in modelling the determinants of infant birth weight as compared to the other counterparts of the exponential families of distributions. The parameter estimates of the Tweedie regression model found child’s gender and maternal factors (religion, marital status and educational level) to contribute substantially to the birth weight of infants. Also, the study recommends that except for the status of antenatal care, emphasis must be placed on determining the reasons for the decrease in infant birth weight as a result of the maternal factors; parity, delivery type and the age of the mother.

China’s debt trap diplomacy has been debated among academia, think tanks, and the policymaking community. Unlike previous research, which mainly focuses on China’s lending practice and strategic intentions, this study looks at the measurement of this narrative and its relations with the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the China threat narratives. In particular, based on Google Trends search results from 1 February 2018 to 7 November 2021, this study creatively created weekly time series data to measure the narratives. Based on an autoregressive distributed lag model, this study finds that the BRI narrative and the China threat narrative make significant contributions to the debt trap diplomacy narrative. Results based on sub-datasets show that these significant relations are mainly driven by the English-speaking Indian public and that these relations are insignificant in the United States. This study contributes to the literature on China’s debt trap diplomacy by bringing solid empirical evidence and to academia as well in methods by presenting a (still) new quantitative approach to international relations.

Society has built institutions to face various problems in each area of our lives. Yet, institutions face considerable problems in fulfilling their objectives in a continuously changing world. With this in mind, the present study starts from the institutional resistance to change and searches for ways to improve efficiency and increase the positive impact on social welfare. For this, we start by looking at the competition authorities as new institutions and we study how they work and the role of communication, learning, and transparency in increasing institutional efficiency and receiving social legitimacy. The paper begins with a mixed theoretical approach to institutional change and focuses on the role of legitimacy in stimulating institutional change, and the type of institutional change for increasing efficiency. The research ends with the Romanian case study which shows the necessary aspects for making the institutional change real.

In mid-2022, Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier spoke out in favour of introducing compulsory service in Germany. Against the backdrop of the Bundeswehr restructuring, necessitated by the war in Ukraine, and the worsening personnel shortage in the social sector and in nursing care, he revived a debate that had been recurring in Germany for decades. Based on an online survey of more than 7,300 people, this article examines how Germans feel about compulsory service and what factors are associated with this attitude. More than 63% of respondents are in favour of compulsory service. Psychological factors such as solidarity, sense of duty, extraversion and openness play just as important a role as political attitudes. People who position themselves more right-wing/nationalist/traditional view compulsory service more positively than liberal and left-wing respondents. In terms of voting intention, CDU/CSU and AfD supporters in particular support a general compulsory service, whereas it is less strongly supported by Greens, SPD and FDP supporters and even rejected by a majority of Left supporters. Another key factor for the evaluation of compulsory service is the respondents’ own experience with completed service. Respondents who have done military service view compulsory service more positively than those who have done community service. Those who have regular voluntary commitments also view compulsory service positively.

In multiparty systems, maintaining a distinct and positive partisan identity may be more difficult for those who identify with minor parties, because such parties lack the rich history of success that could reinforce a positive social standing in the political realm. Yet, we know little about the unique nature of minor partisan identities because partisanship tends to be most prominent in single-member plurality systems that tend toward two dominant parties, such as the United States. Canada provides a fascinating case of a single-member plurality electoral system that has consistently led to a multiparty system, ideal for studying minor party identity. We use large datasets of public opinion data, collected in 2019 and 2021 in Canada, to test a Lasso regression, a machine learning technique, to identify the factors that are the most important to predict whether partisans of minor political parties will seek in-group distinctiveness , meaning that they seek a different and positive political identity from the major political parties they are in competition with, or take part in out-group favouritism , meaning that they seek to become closer major political parties. We find that party rating is the most important predictor. The more partisans of the minor party rate their own party favourably, the more they take part in distinctiveness. We also find that the more minor party partisans perceive the major party as favourable, the more favouritism they will show towards the major party.

The theoretical literature on the revenue-spending nexus suggests four possible relationships. They are tax-and-spend, negative tax-and-spend, spend-and-tax, and fiscal synchronization. Despite their homogenous research design, the empirical studies of Canada have provided mixed and inconclusive results. This study re-examines the topic from a time-frequency perspective. Specifically, it applies continuous wavelet analysis to the period 1867–2017 to delineate a complete picture of the revenue-spending nexus in Canada. Although results show the existence of all relationships suggested by theory at different time-frequency combinations, the spend-and-tax pattern is the most striking one and dominates the nexus in the long run. Theoretical, methodological, and policy-wise implications of this study are discussed at the end.