Reflections of the Covid-19 pandemic on the acquisition costs of agricultural inputs: an empirical investigation using the Total Cost Ownership methodology

The Covid19 disease, resulting from contamination by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, impacted on the economy, especially in the agricultural sector, which has become more susceptible to these impacts through the rise in costs that are not easily perceived. This study aims to analyze the impact on input acquisition costs, caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, in small family farms, from the perspective of the Total Cost Ownership (TCO) methodology. The methodology used in this research was a case study in 12 family farms, located in the southern region of Brazil, with data collected from April 2017 to March 2020. Four inputs common to all properties were analyzed. The results showed that there was an increase of 39.47% in the acquisition costs of inputs and a weighted average increase of 34.7%, which had a negative impact on the monetary result of family properties. It was concluded that the properties were affected by the effects of the pandemic with regard to the purchase of inputs, mainly with an increase in acquisition costs, due to the shortage of essential supplies for the basic operations of small rural properties. © Este é um artigo publicado em acesso aberto (Open Access) sob a licença Creative Commons Attribution, que permite uso, distribuição e reprodução em qualquer meio, sem restrições desde que o trabalho original seja corretamente citado.

Modern pandemic crises and R&D investment

This study investigates the impact of crises caused by pandemics on firms' R&D investments. We explore these associations by utilizing a comprehensive cross-country sample of 261,959 firm-year observations collected from 39 countries during five modern health crises (SARS in 2003, H1N1 in 2009, MERS in 2012, Ebola in 2012, and Zika in 2016). The results indicate that pandemics have a positive and significant impact on R&D investment. Furthermore, we show that private firms in civil-law countries were more likely to adopt conservative financial policies than those in common-law countries. We conclude that the difference between the legal origins of private firms influences the impact on R&D investment. Moreover, it promotes conservative policies to reduce private firms' R&D investment in countries with civil law.

Consequences of Corona Pandemic in Jordanian Society: an Analytical Social Study

The study aimed at identifying the social, economic, health, and psychological consequences of Corona pandemic in Jordanian society, and identifying the predictive value of demographic, social, and economic variables in explaining the different repercussions of Corona pandemic on the members of Jordanian society. In order to achieve the objectives of the study, a data collection scale was designed. The sample consisted of 2570 respondents chosen randomly. The study was based on the social survey methodology. The study revealed the depth of consequences left by the pandemic on Jordanian society. They all have high averages and they are arranged in a row from the highest: Economic followed by psychological, health, and social. The study also revealed that there is a statistical effect of demographic variables on all aspects of life. This indicates the obvious impact of the independent variables included in the (regression equation) on all aspects of life: social, economic, health, and psychological life during the Corona pandemic. © 2023 DSR Publishers/ The University of Jordan.

Canada?s Cannabis Legalization with Strict Public Health Control

To describe the impact of the legalization of cannabis for recreational use under strict public health control in 2018 on the fol-lowing outcomes: cannabis use and use patterns, attributable harm, economic considerations. Methodology: Narrative review based on govern-ment documents, surveys, and published literature. Results: The 12-month prevalence increased after legalization and has decreased during the COVID-19 pandemic. Little change in prevalence for adolescents. Persons with daily use remained stable. No rigorous studies on changes in attributable health harm, but some indication that harm, as measured in prevalence of cannabis use disorders, treatment rate, and attributable traffic injury remained stable. No data yet available for cancer. Cannabis attributable emergency visits increased, including among children (poisoning). Cannabis-related offences decreased as biggest public health gain. Economic predictions were not realized, and there is some pressure from cannabis industry to loosen public health regulations in order to increase use. Conclusions: Overall, while not achieving its main objectives of more youth protection and decreases in cannabis-attributable health harm, legalization with strict public health control resulted in less cannabis-related offences and up to now did not seem to increase cannabis-attributable disease burden.

Canada's Cannabis Legalization with Strict Public Health Control Lessons for Germany?

Aims: To describe the impact of the legalization of cannabis for recreational use under strict public health control in 2018 on the following outcomes: cannabis use and use patterns, attributable harm, economic considerations. Methodology: Narrative review based on government documents, surveys, and published literature. Result(s): The 12-month prevalence increased after legalization and has decreased during the COVID-19 pandemic. Little change in prevalence for adolescents. Persons with daily use remained stable. No rigorous studies on changes in attributable health harm, but some indication that harm, as measured in prevalence of cannabis use disorders, treatment rate, and attributable traffic injury remained stable. No data yet available for cancer. Cannabis attributable emergency visits increased, including among children (poisoning). Cannabis-related offences decreased as biggest public health gain. Economic predictions were not realized, and there is some pressure from cannabis industry to loosen public health regulations in order to increase use. Conclusion(s): Overall, while not achieving its main objectives of more youth protection and decreases in cannabis-attributable health harm, legalization with strict public health control resulted in less cannabis-related offences and up to now did not seem to increase cannabis-attributable disease burden.Copyright © 2023 Hogrefe Verlag GmbH & Co. KG. All rights reserved.

Increase of nutritional security in Sub-Saharan Africa through the production of dried products from underutilized crops

Currently, an estimated 20% of the population in Sub-Saharan Africa is food insecure with the incidence of hunger and malnutrition still rising. This trend is amplified by the socio-economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. In contrast, more than a third of the harvestable perishable produce is lost due to a lack of preservation or failure to utilize preservation as is the case for underutilized crops (UCs). Moreover, some of the preservation techniques utilized are poor, leading to the deterioration of food quality, especially the micronutrients. In this study, we thus exemplarily investigated the impact of different drying settings on the quality of two highly nutritious UCs, namely cocoyam and orange-flesh sweet potato (OFSP) (40, 60, and 80 °C for cocoyam and 40, 50, 60, and 70 °C for OFSP) to deduce the optimum quality retention and further develop a theoretical design of processing units and processing guidelines for decentralized food processing. Drying cocoyam at 80 °C and OFSP at 60 °C, respectively resulted in a relatively shorter drying time (135 and 210 min), a lower total color difference (2.29 and 11.49-13.92), greater retentions for total phenolics (0.43 mg GAE/100 gDM and 155.0-186.5 mg GAE/100 gDM), total flavonoid (128 mg catechin/100 gDM and 79.5-81.7 mg catechin/100 gDM) and total antioxidant activity (80.85% RSA and 322.58-334.67 mg AAE/100 gDM), respectively for cocoyam and OFSP. The β-carotene, ascorbic acid and vitamin A activity per 100 gDM of the OFSP flours ranged between 6.91- 9.53 mg, 25.90 − 35.72 mg, and 0.53 − 0.73 mg RAE, respectively. © 2022 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.

Canada's Cannabis Legalization with Strict Public Health Control: Lessons for Germany?

:Aims: To describe the impact of the legalization of cannabis for recreational use under strict public health control in 2018 on the following outcomes: cannabis use and use patterns, attributable harm, economic considerations. Methodology: Narrative review based on government documents, surveys, and published literature. Results: The 12-month prevalence increased after legalization and has decreased during the COVID-19 pandemic. Little change in prevalence for adolescents. Persons with daily use remained stable. No rigorous studies on changes in attributable health harm, but some indication that harm, as measured in prevalence of cannabis use disorders, treatment rate, and attributable traffic injury remained stable. No data yet available for cancer. Cannabis attributable emergency visits increased, including among children (poisoning). Cannabis-related offences decreased as biggest public health gain. Economic predictions were not realized, and there is some pressure from cannabis industry to loosen public health regulations in order to increase use. Conclusions: Overall, while not achieving its main objectives of more youth protection and decreases in cannabis-attributable health harm, legalization with strict public health control resulted in less cannabis-related offences and up to now did not seem to increase cannabis-attributable disease burden. (English) [ FROM AUTHOR]

AI-app development for Yolov5-based face mask wearing detection

Corona is one of the most destructive viruses that has ever produced a pandemic in human life, not only in terms of direct victims but also in terms of the socio-economic consequences of the virus' transmission. The 2nd anniversary of the global coronavirus pandemic passed away in 2021. However, it's still impossible to say how long the epidemic will last. After reviewing a study by the World Health Organization on COVID-19, the country's national government urged residents to use facemask in order to reduce the incidence of COVID-19 transmission. As a result of COVID-19, there are presently no facemask detection app that are in great demand for ensuring safety in public area. In the context of the outbreak of COVID-19, A facemask detection model based on deep learning approach of state-of-the-art YOLOv5 may be useful in real-time applications. In this paper, we propose a web app for detecting if the people wears facemask or not in real-time via webcam or public camera. In the app, we deployed and persisted many different YOLOv5-based models that the users can switch between them to guarantee the performance and timing trade-off. Furthermore, our system is able to detect if an individual person captured by surveillance cameras is wearing facemask in acceptable counting time at staging level. In our opinion, this kind of system is extremely efficient for use in airports, train stations, offices, and other public areas, as well as in military. © 2022 IEEE.

Migration from the perspective of climate change

The present paper has as main objective to examine the literature and show the literature review, debates and discussions related to migration and implication of economic development. Media and academic circles are strongly attracted by the topic of migration and its consequences. Aspects brought into attention, from migration and economic development point of view are: climate change, social, economic, political and legislative. The reality is pushing us to research this phenomenon because migration effects are already visible and important for European communities, both for origin and destination countries. It comes questions that point to the core of economic, social, politic and environmental developments of the 21(st) century and these are referring to environmental and climate justice, as well as existing and growing of the relationships between the involved parties. This paper presents also the literature review analysis of different framings, points of view and lines of argument, and highlighting debates about securitization of climate change, depending on economic and connections to development studies and adaptation research and their influence on migration decision. Migration decision dependents on many factors, such as: level of life, education, employment opportunities, gender and age, familial needs and financial possibilities, but climate change, too. Also, the present paper will point out scientific papers that address the new challenges influencing labour migration inside European Union such as: COVID-19 pandemic, environmental changes, besides social inequalities and regional conflicts which are now at the borders of the European space.

An epidemic-economic model for COVID-19.

In this paper, we propose a new mathematical model to study the epidemic and economic consequences of COVID-19, with a focus on the interaction between the disease transmission, the pandemic management, and the economic growth. We consider both the symptomatic and asymptomatic infections and incorporate the effectiveness of disease control into the respective transmission rates. Meanwhile, the progression of the pandemic and the evolution of the susceptible, infectious and recovered population groups directly impact the mitigation and economic development levels. We fit this model to the reported COVID-19 cases and unemployment rates in the US state of Tennessee, as a demonstration of a real-world application of the modeling framework.

COVID-19-What Price Do Children Pay? An Analysis of Economic and Social Policy Factors.

Numerous studies have addressed the indirect consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic for children such as social isolation or increases in reported child maltreatment. Research on the economic and sociopolitical consequences is scarce as they can only be evaluated with a time lag. To improve our understanding of future, long-term developments in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, we gathered findings from the still unexploited empirical literature on the aftermath of earlier pandemics, epidemics, and other infectious disease outbreaks. On top of this, we scrutinized research on past economic crises to interpret the link between changes in the economy and the health of children. Many of the side effects of battling the spread of the current pandemic, such as school closures, the stigma of infection, or conflicts about vaccines, are not novel and have already been documented in connection with previous infectious disease outbreaks. Results highlight that changes in the financial situation of families and socio-political challenges affect the situation and daily routine of children and youth in the long term. In consequence, the already pronounced socioeconomic inequalities will likely further increase. On top of this, due to reduced revenues, child protective services are likely to face challenges in the availability of human and financial resources.

Russian Enterprises at the End of 2021: Covering the Consequences of the Covid-19 Pandemic and Activities for the Greening of Production.

The paper analyzes and comments on the results of a regular survey of Russian enterprises in the real sector, which was conducted by the Institute of Economic Forecasting of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The opinions of enterprises about the acuteness of various macroeconomic problems in Russia are given. The assessments of enterprises about the quality of the anticrisis policy of the state during the pandemic are presented. The information about the relationship between Russian enterprises and banks is reflected. The situation with the tax burden of enterprises is studied. The need of enterprises in labor force and labor migrants is considered. The potential for output growth without additional investments is estimated. The views of Russian enterprises on resource and energy saving as well as on the global sustainable development goals are presented. The data on the actions of enterprises in the field of environmental insurance are reflected.

Sustainable Development of Russian Budget System Under the Influence of Covid-19 Pandemic

This article analyzes the economic consequences of the spread of coronavirus infection in Russia. In order to eliminate the negative consequences of the pandemic and social support of the population, some changes were made to the country's budget legislation. This has led to various changes and uncertainties in the budget sphere. The article suggests measures to further stabilize the economic situation in the country and improve budget relations in the Russian Federation. The purpose of this study is to suggest new measures for the sustainable development of the country's budget system, to eliminate the negative consequences of the pandemic and to provide social support to the population. To achieve this goal, the article analyzes the changes that occurred in the Russian economy and budget system in 2020, determines the impact of the measures taken on the current situation, and suggests new options for improving budget relations in the country. Despite a significant number of studies in this area, the topic is relevant due to the large number of changes that occurred in 2020. As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, many problems emerged in the economy (in particular in the public sector) and in the social sphere, which will have to be solved in the coming years. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

A Multi-Objective Optimization-based Clustering Approach for CORD-19 Scholarly Articles

The pandemic disease COVID-19, originated from the SARS-CoV-2 virus has spread globally. Researchers are working tirelessly on areas including studying the transmission of COVID-19, promoting its identification, designing new vaccines and therapies, and recognizing its socio-economic consequences. This extensive research leads to the exploration of thousands of scientific papers related to biology, chemistry, genetics, health, and economy. Therefore, it is essential to develop an intelligent text mining technique for segregating this rich source of data to perform easy access, information retrieval, and interpretation within minimum time and resources. We propose a multi-objective optimization-based document clustering approach for the CORD-19 (COVID-19 Open Research Dataset) dataset in this paper. Here, a new technique utilizing BioBERT has been proposed, which benefits from the and the document text, rather than only the brief , to perceive a concise understanding of the text to generate clusters with better definitions. The main contributions of the proposed work are two-fold: in the first step, we have used BioBERT to generate the sentence embedding which is further used for the document representation. In the next step, we have developed a multi-objective optimization (MOO) based clustering algorithm for grouping the generated document vector representations. In this MOO-based clustering, we have used Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm-II and Fuzzy c-means algorithm as the underlying MOO and clustering technique, respectively. This model is evaluated using the Silhouette Score (Silhouette score) and Calinski-Harabasz index (CH index), and the clustering solutions are visualized using word clouds. The clustering results exhibit significant improvements over various other existing clustering models. © 2021 IEEE.

Economic consequences of the COVID-19 impact on the tourism development in arctic regions of Russia

The authors assess the economic impact of the restrictions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic on the compo-nents of tourism and recreation system in the Arctic regions of Russia. They propose the estimation method, which includes indicators of changes in the sale volume and structure of the tourism industry services, changes in the revenue volume and share of tour operators, changes in the monopolization level and the distribution structure of market shares of tour operators in the Arctic regions. The study results can be used to adjust policy and strategic documents for tourism development in the Arctic regions of Russia. © Konyshev E. V., Lutoshkina A. K., 2021.

TRENDS, RISKS AND PROSPECTS FOR INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX DEVELOPMENT OF SOUTH OF RUSSIA IN NEW ECONOMIC REALITIES

Events caused by complex crisis which became evident in regional economies as a result of the spread of COVID-19 have affected the manufacturing industry of the South of Russia. The purpose of this article is to identify and analyse the prospects for the sustainable development of industry in the South of Russia in the context of new economic trends. The methodological basis of the study is founded on the theory of shocks, which made it possible to place at the center of the system of cause and-effect relationships a set of factors in business activity decrease, which are considered as shocks that form new development trends. The analysis revealed the presence of problems of production interruptions and break of supply chains, reduction in resource flows, as well as a decrease in effective demand for industrial products. According to the opinion of the authors, the prospects for the development of the industrial complex of the region are associated with the balance of market self-regulation and government regulation, and are also determined by the accumulated potential of the regional industry and available adaptive capabilities.

Russian Companies in Autumn 2020: Activities in the COVID-19 Pandemic and Views on the Transition to the Best Available Technologies (BAT).

The paper analyzes and comments on the results of a regular survey of Russian enterprises in the real sector, which was conducted by the Institute of Economic Forecasting of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Information on the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on the activities of domestic enterprises is provided. The opinions of enterprises on the severity of various macroeconomic problems in Russia are reflected. The data on the relations between Russian enterprises and banks are presented. The degree of demand of Russian enterprises in the modernization of production is determined. Information on purchases of domestic and foreign equipment in Russia is considered. The assessments of enterprises regarding the quality of Russian machinery and equipment are given. The data on delays in the supply of raw materials and components are presented. The opinions of enterprises on the implementation of the best available technologies (BAT) in Russia are reflected.

Assessing the consequences of quarantines during a pandemic.

This paper analyzes the epidemiological and economic effects of quarantines. We use a basic epidemiological model, a SEIR-model, that is calibrated to roughly resemble the COVID-19 pandemic, and we assume that individuals that become infected or are isolated on average lose a share of their productivity. An early quarantine postpones but does not alter the course of the pandemic at a cost that increases in the duration and the extent of the quarantine. For quarantines at later stages of the pandemic there is a trade-off between lowering the peak level of infectious people on the one hand and minimizing fatalities and economic losses on the other hand. A longer quarantine dampens the peak level of infectious people and also reduces the total number of infected persons but increases economic losses. Both the peak level of infectious individuals and the total share of the population that will have been infected are U-shaped in relation to the share of the population in quarantine, while economic costs increase in this share. In particular, a quarantine covering a moderate share of the population leads to a lower peak, fewer deaths and lower economic costs, but it implies that the peak of the pandemic occurs earlier.

Shedding Light on the Direct and Indirect Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on the Lebanese Radiographers or Radiologic Technologists: A Crisis within Crises.

With the novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, the need for radiologic procedures is increasing for the effective diagnosis and follow-up of pulmonary diseases. There is an immense load on the radiographers' shoulders to cope with all the challenges associated with the pandemic. However, amidst this crisis, Lebanese radiographers are also suffering from a socioeconomic crisis and record hyperinflation that have posed additional challenges. A cross-sectional study was conducted among registered Lebanese radiographers to assess the general, workplace conditions, health and safety, mental/psychologic, financial, and skill/knowledge development impacts. Despite applying an adapted safety protocol, institutions are neither providing free RT-PCR testing to their staff nor showing adequate support for infected staff members, thus causing distress about contracting the virus from the workplace. Aggravated by the deteriorating economic situation that affected the radiographers financially, they additionally suffer from severe occupational physical and mental burnout. Regardless of that, they used their free time during the lockdown for skill/knowledge development and have performed many recreational activities. This cross-sectional study highlighted the different ways the pandemic has impacted the radiographers: physically, psychologically, and financially. It aimed to shed light on what these frontline heroes are passing through in the midst of all these unprecedented crises.