Search results for "Middle East"
showing 10 items of 106 documents
Urban Development and Social Change in Qatar: The Qatar National Vision 2030 and the 2022 FIFA World Cup
2012
On 2 December 2010, Qatar, the exotic outsider, surprisingly won the bid for the 2022 FIFA World Cup, thereby becoming the first Middle Eastern country chosen to host the global festival of this ‘royal football league’. Qataris have high hopes for the tournament, and ambitious aims for their country's development in preparation for 2022 and beyond. Since the rise to power of the current Amir, Shaikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, in 1995, he has gradually introduced neoliberal policies in an attempt to build a knowledge-based economy. These developments are taking place in the context of Qatar's National Vision 2030, the blueprint for Qatar's economic, social, human, and environmental developm…
The importance of the Logistics Performance Index in international trade
2014
Logistics and transport increasingly play a pivotal role in international trade relations. The Logistics Performance Index (LPI) analyses differences between countries in terms of customs procedures, logistics costs and the quality of the infrastructure for overland and maritime transport. The aim of this article is to analyse the impact that each of these components has on trade in emerging economies using a gravity model. Furthermore, the study also attempts to detect possible advances in logistics in developing countries, which are grouped into five regions (Africa, South America, Far East, Middle East and Eastern Europe) by comparing the first LPI data published in 2007 with the most re…
The impact of information and communication technology (ICT), education and regulation on economic freedom in Islamic Middle Eastern countries
2009
Our study investigated the impact of ICT expansion on economic freedom in the Middle East (Bahrain, Iran, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen). Our empirical analysis used archival data from 1995 to 2005; it showed that ICT expansion in the Middle East has been effective both in bridging the digital divide and also in promoting economic freedom in a region that was vulnerable to political, social, and global conflict. However, differences between countries, such as the educational attainment of their citizens and institutional resistance to technology acceptance, both enhanced and restricted the relationship between ICT and economic fre…
EU Refugee Policies and Politics in Times of Crisis: Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives
2017
Phenomena such as civil war, protracted conflict, and deteriorating internal security, especially in the Middle East, Africa and Southern Asia, have triggered massive departures of civilian populations in recent years. The war in Syria alone has displaced over 5 million people (UNHCR, 2017a). While most of these forced migrants are either internally displaced or remain in Syria’s immediate neighbourhood, the numbers of those trying to come to Europe have steeply increased in 2015 and 2016. In each of these two years more than 1.2 million asylum-seekers submitted their asylum claims in the EU (Eurostat, 2017a), as compared to 625,000 in 2014 (Eurostat, 2015, p. 4). This represents the larges…
Entrepreneurship in the Middle East and North Africa: A Bibliometric Analysis
2018
Bibliometrics is an important field of information science that enables bibliographic material to be studied quantitatively. Using bibliometric techniques, this chapter offers an overview of entrepreneurship research in the Middle East and North Africa. Using the Web of Science and Scopus databases, we identify the most relevant research in this field, classified by the most influential authors and the top papers, journals and countries. The sample includes 657 articles published from 1963 to 2016, from 387 different sources. The findings show that studies addressing this topic have been published mainly in non-JCR-indexed journals. In contrast, it is important to note that the top papers (…
From mental hygiene to mental health: ideology, discourses and practices in Franco’s Spain (1939–75)
2017
Based on an analysis of the discourses, the ideological appropriation and the practical influence of mental hygiene in Spanish psychiatry during the early years of the Francoist regime, this article examines its decline and subsequent replacement by the new concept of mental health promoted by the World Health Organization and other international bodies from the mid-twentieth century. The old approach, essentially focused on the prophylaxis of insanity within the framework of a set of interventionist policies of social defence, was thus transformed from the beginning of the 1960s into a much more ambitious and comprehensive project which sought to promote the psychosocial balance and perfo…
Predicting who fails to meet the physical activity guideline in pregnancy: a prospective study of objectively recorded physical activity in a populat…
2016
Background A low physical activity (PA) level in pregnancy is associated with several adverse health outcomes. Early identification of pregnant women at risk of physical inactivity could inform strategies to promote PA, but no studies so far have presented attempts to develop prognostic models for low PA in pregnancy. Based on moderate-to-vigorous intensity PA (MVPA) objectively recorded in mid/late pregnancy, our objectives were to describe MVPA levels and compliance with the PA guideline (≥150 MVPA minutes/week), and to develop a prognostic model for non-compliance with the PA guideline. Methods From a multi-ethnic population-based cohort, we analysed data from 555 women with MVPA recorde…
Correction for Frantz et al., Ancient pigs reveal a near-complete genomic turnover following their introduction to Europe
2020
Significance Archaeological evidence indicates that domestic pigs arrived in Europe, alongside farmers from the Near East ∼8,500 y ago, yet mitochondrial genomes of modern European pigs are derived from European wild boars. To address this conundrum, we obtained mitochondrial and nuclear data from modern and ancient Near Eastern and European pigs. Our analyses indicate that, aside from a coat color gene, most Near Eastern ancestry in the genomes of European domestic pigs disappeared over 3,000 y as a result of interbreeding with local wild boars. This implies that pigs were not domesticated independently in Europe, yet the first 2,500 y of human-mediated selection applied by Near Eastern Ne…
Genotypic analysis at multiple loci across Kaposi's sarcoma herpesvirus (KSHV) DNA molecules: clustering patterns, novel variants and chimerism
2001
Abstract Background: the genomes of human Kaposi's sarcoma-associated herpesvirus (KSHV) display several levels of DNA sequence heterogeneity and subgrouping that show distinctive clustering patterns in related human populations. The four major subtype patterns for the hypervariable ORF-K1 protein correlate closely with the principal diasporas resulting from the migration of modern humans out of East Africa and suggest that KSHV is an ancient human virus that is transmitted primarily in a familial fashion with consequent very low recombination rates. However, chimeric genomes have also been detected, especially with regard to the presence of P versus M alleles of the ORF-K15 gene. Objective…
Global Pinoys: The Archipelago of Migration
2017
The Republic of the Philippines is one of the top exporters of migrant labor throughout the world. Millions of Filipino overseas workers can be found in North America, the Middle East, Western Europe, Australia and Asia (Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, Korea, Malaysia). Since the 1970s, the Philippine government has encouraged labor migration as a way to alleviate unemployment at home and to gather remittances used to boost spending in the domestic economy. The government’s Philippine Overseas Employment Agency manages the implementation of labor agreements with partner countries and exerts some control on the myriad of private agencies recruiting Philippine labor for foreign jobs. Many expatr…