Grace Nkansa Asante, Paul Owusu Takyi, Gideon Mensah
ABSTRACTIt is hypothesized that a well-functioning financial market is necessary but not sufficient condition to achieve the expected economic growth. Therefore, policy instruments of government aimed at streamlining financial sector activity in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) are imperative. As a result, this paper explores the effect of financial development on economic growth by allowing the link between the two far variables to be mediated by the quality of institutions for the period 2000–2019. Using Twenty-nine (29) countries and the System-Generalized Method of Moments (system-GMM) estimation method, it is found that financial development has a positive and significant effect on economic growth. In addition, it is found that, when rule of law, political stability, and regulatory quality are highly effective, the positive effect of financial development on economic growth is magnified.
Economic growth, development, planning, Human settlements. Communities
Kennedy Machira, Wisdom Richard Mgomezulu, Mark Malata
Poverty alleviation remains one of the ancient goals of Malawi as the country has since 1994 adopted a poverty alleviation strategy throughout its developmental programs. Through the support of the World Bank, a poverty monitoring system was put in place whose data are collected through the Living Standards Measurement Surveys (LSMS). However, since the establishment of the LSMS, findings of different assessments and eras have revealed instabilities in the country’s poverty levels overtime. What remains unclear is whether households have been able to move out of poverty or not. The current study employed a two wave LSMS panel of 2016 and 2019 and assessed poverty dimensions including poverty incidence, depth and severity. The study further assessed the determinants of poverty transitions in order to understand movements in and out of poverty. Household size, gender of household head, education level of the household head, agricultural land holding sizes, access to credit, residence (urban or rural) and expected shocks significantly influenced the poverty dimensions and poverty transition. It is hence imperative that proper strategies that embrace robust and sustainable credit systems, improvement in literacy levels of the Malawian population, and further improving agricultural land productivity can help reduce poverty and further move households out of poverty. Such initiatives should take into consideration the gender divide and the rapid population growth faced by the country.
Cities. Urban geography, Urbanization. City and country
YBPK Christian Elementary School in Ngaglik, Sukun, Malang has applied the School Literacy Movement (SLM) at the stages of habituation and development with the support from the Community Service Team, Faculty of Cultural Studies Universitas Brawijaya. The community service in 2021 was specifically aimed at assisting the school in implementing the SLM learning stage. At this stage, literacy activities were carried out in the pre-reading, whilst-reading, and post-reading activities. The post-reading activities resulted in several products, including mind maps, drawings, posters, and poems. The teachers observed that the students felt comfortable with the selected SLM activities. This also suggests that teachers are required to be resourceful in designing literacy activities. The programme evaluation reveals that some students were uninterested in the pre-reading activities because the teachers simply explained the vocabulary used in the reading. Nevertheless, the school is committed to keeping the SLM programme to help achieve the school goals of producing excellent graduates and creating an enjoyable learning atmosphere for the teachers and students.
PLANS FOR THE CREATION OF A NEW CHURCH SLAVIC ARMENIAN CATHOLIC UNION IN POLAND IN THE 1930S
In the second half of the 1930s, a group of Old Catholic and Orthodox priests and believers from Zamość Region and Volhynia tried to join the Catholic Church. Ignacy Jan Wysoczański (1901-1975) was the framer of this plan. A new church structure was to be under the jurisdiction of the Armenian archbishop of Lwów, Józef Teodorowicz (1864-1938), who accepted the idea with enthusiasm. Efforts undertaken to achieve the confirmation of the union in 1935 were negatively assessed by the Vatican Congregation for Eastern Churches, mainly due to formal questions, because – according to the canon law and the concordat signed with Poland – priests and believers expressing willingness to join the Catholic Church should be subordinate to the bishop of the place. It soon turned out that Ignacy Wysoczański was a controversial and unsteady person, which ultimately shattered the plan.
Nicht erst seit der Covid-19-Pandemie nimmt der Online-Lebensmitteleinzelhandel in Deutschland zu und bringt neue, teilweise hybride, Betriebsformen und Vertriebsmodelle hervor. Hiermit gehen bisher kaum untersuchte räumliche Veränderungen der einzelnen Wertschöpfungsschritte einher, beispielsweise in den Bereichen vorgelagerte Logistik, Filialstruktur und Warenübergabe. Anhand von drei ausgewählten Fallbeispielen (Picnic, Wochenmarkt24 und Rewe) wurden neuere
Betriebsformen und deren räumliche Logistik- und Vertriebsstrukturen identifiziert und unterschiedliche Standortfaktoren aufgeführt. Diese beinhalten neben den typischen Faktoren der Standortwahl für Distributionslager (Nähe zu Kunden, Arbeitskräften und Lieferanten) auch spezifische betriebsformen- und vertriebsmodellabhängige Faktoren, wie eine
stärkere Verkürzung der ,letzten Meile‘, eine Mindest- oder Maximalverdichtung von Haushalten im Einzugsgebiet oder die Nähe zu einer (landwirtschaftlichen) Erzeugerstruktur.
Cities. Urban geography, Urbanization. City and country
Abstract Reconstructing and quantifying human impacts is an important step in understanding how, when, and to what extent humans have changed terrestrial ecosystems via agricultural land use during the Holocene. However, the use of soil-faunal indicators and an associated quantitative model of land use intensity to study anthropogenic disturbance is relatively poorly developed. In this study we collected 139 samples of soil-dwelling snails from urban land and human settlements, cultivated land, modified and natural vegetation mosaics, and natural habitats in northern China, in order to characterize the snail assemblages in human-modified habitats. The results show that cultivated land and planted forest are mainly dominated by snails of Cathaica fasiola, Bradybaena ravida, Vallonia tenera, etc., while natural habitats are characterized by an even distribution of members of the families, such as Ariophantidae, Cochlicopidae, Pupillidae, Subulinidae. Canonical correspondence analysis indicates that human activity (quantified by the human influence index, HII) is one of the most important factors shaping the composition of snail fauna in man-modified habitats. There is a significant relationship between modern snail data and HII, and the transfer function established by weighted-averaging partial least squares (WA-PLS) model for HII exhibits a good statistical performance. We then applied the calibration model to a fossil snail record spanning the last 12 kyr from the Chinese Loess Plateau (CLP). The reconstructed HII increases slightly at ∼5 ka and abruptly at ∼2 ka, coinciding with increases in the human population of the CLP, local cultural development, and human-induced changes in vegetation cover. Our quantitative reconstruction indicates that human activities, via agricultural activity, may have permanently altered natural ecosystems and the soil fauna for at least the last two millennia.
Carnivores are of high ecological importance and often serve as flagship species for conservation. Yet, the direct and indirect effects of trophic interactions and human disturbance on carnivore communities and the occurrence of their prey in temperate forests remain poorly understood. Here we evaluate the direct and indirect effects of net primary productivity, prey (Muntjac spp) occupancy and human disturbance in shaping carnivore richness and biomass based on camera‐trap data and path analysis. Path analysis indicated that muntjac occupancy and proximity of human settlements were the main factors structuring carnivore communities. Carnivore biomass was directly affected by muntjac occupancy, while carnivore richness increased with distance from the nearest residential site. Muntjac occupancy per se directly depended on net primary productivity. We also identified several indirect effects on carnivore biomass. Increasing distance to the nearest residential site had a positive indirect effect on carnivore biomass that was mediated by increasing carnivore richness. Net primary productivity was positively associated with carnivore biomass indirectly via increasing muntjac occupancy. There were no significant correlations between the occurrence probability of livestock and muntjac. Our results point to the importance of incorporating prey occurrence and human disturbance in modelling biodiversity patterns of carnivore communities. Carnivore conservation management practices should include efforts to stop hunting and to restrict human presence in the core zones of protected areas.
Bacterial communities in human-impacted rivers and streams are exposed to multiple anthropogenic contaminants, which can eventually lead to biodiversity loss and function. The Wonderfonteinspruit catchment area is impacted by operational and abandoned gold mines, farms, and formal and informal settlements. In this study, we used 16S rRNA gene high-throughput sequencing to characterize bacterial communities in the lower Wonderfonteinspruit and their response to various contaminant sources. The results showed that composition and structure of bacterial communities differed significantly (P<0.05) between less (downstream) and more (upstream) polluted sites. The taxonomic and functional gene dissimilarities significantly correlated with each other, while downstream sites had more distinct functional genes. The relative abundance of Proteobacteria, Bacteroidetes and Actinobacteria was higher at upstream sites, while Acidobacteria, Cyanobacteria, Firmicutes and Verrucomicrobia were prominent at downstream sites. In addition, upstream sites were rich in genera pathogenic and/or potentially pathogenic to humans. Multivariate and correlation analyses suggest that bacterial diversity was significantly (P<0.05) impacted by pH and heavy metals (cobalt, arsenic, chromium, nickel and uranium). A significant fraction (~14%) of the compositional variation was explained by a combination of anthropogenic inputs, of which mining (~6%) was the main contributor to bacterial community variation. Network analysis indicated that bacterial communities had non-random inter- and intra-phyla associations and that the main taxa showed both positive and negative linkages to environmental parameters. Our results suggest that species sorting, due to environmental parameters, was the main process that structured bacterial communities. Furthermore, upstream sites had higher relative abundances of genes involved in xenobiotic degradation, suggesting stronger removal of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and other organic compounds. This study provides insights into the influences of anthropogenic land use on bacterial community structure and functions in the lower Wonderfonteinspruit.
L. Pilz, R. Levandovski, Melissa A B Oliveira
et al.
Quilombos are settlements originally founded by Africans and African descendants (Quilombolas) in remote parts of Brazil to escape slavery. Due to individual histories, Quilombos nowadays exhibit different states of industrialisation, making them ideal for studying the influence of electrification on daily behaviour. In a comparative approach, we aimed to understand whether and how human sleep changes with the introduction of artificial light. We investigated daily rest-activity-rhythms and sleep-patterns in the Quilombolas’ by both wrist actimetry and the Munich ChronoType Questionnaire (MCTQ; the results of these two instruments correlated highly). Seven communities (MCTQ: N = 213/actimetry: N = 125) were compared in this study. Light exposure, phase of activity, sleep timing and duration differ across communities with various levels of urbanisation and histories of access to electricity. People living without electricity and those, who acquired it only very recently on average sleep earlier than those in more urbanised communities (mid-sleep about 1 hour earlier); sleep duration tends to be longer. Our results and those of others show that use of electricity and modern lifestyles have changed sleep behaviour. To understand the consequences of these changes for health, further studies are warranted.
Enhancing the governance of social-ecological systems for more equitable and sustainable development is hindered by inadequate knowledge about how different social groups and communities rely on natural resources. We used openly accessible national survey data to develop a metric of overall dependence on natural resources. These data contain information about households’ sources of water, energy, building materials and food. We used these data in combination with Bayesian learning to model observed patterns of dependence using demographic variables that included: gender of household head, household size, income, house ownership, formality status of settlement, population density, and in-migration rate to the area. We show that a small number of factors—in particular population density and informality of settlements—can explain a significant amount of the observed variation with regards to the use of natural resources. Subsequently, we test the validity of these predictions using alternative, open access data in the eThekwini and Cape Town metropolitan areas of South Africa. We discuss the advantages of using a selection of predictors which could be supplied through remotely sensed and open access data, in terms of opportunities and challenges to produce meaningful results in data-poor areas. With data availability being a common limiting factor in modelling and monitoring exercises, access to inexpensive, up-to-date and free to use data can significantly improve how we monitor progress towards sustainability targets. A small selection of openly accessible demographic variables can predict household’s dependence on local natural resources.
Purpose Whilst the energy transition from fossil fuels to renewables offers significant environmental benefits, the other transition – from a centralised to a distributed energy system – underpins a disruptive model for planning cities, towns and villages. A local energy micro-grid can power a local water micro-grid, which in turn can irrigate a local food system, offering a community the opportunity to harvest, store and distribute food, water and energy within their immediate catchment. A distributed network of regenerative villages, connected virtually and with shared electric vehicles is offered as an alternative vision for future cities. The paper aims to justify this as a preferred model for human settlements and develop an implementation process. Design/methodology/approach This paper asks: Is it inevitable that large cities will keep growing, while rural communities will continue to be deprived of resources and opportunities? Is the flow of people into cities inevitable? To answer this question, the adopted methodology is to take a systems approach, observing town planning processes from a range of different disciplines and perspectives. Findings By contrasting the current centralising city model with a distributed network of villages, this paper offers ten reasons why the distributed network is preferable to centralisation. Research limitations/implications It is argued that in this time of dramatic technological upheaval, environmental destruction and social inequality, business-as-usual is unacceptable in any field of human endeavour. This paper presents a sketch outlining a new human settlement theory, a different way of living on the land. It is an invitation to academics and practitioners to participate in a debate. Originality/value The information and energy revolutions, both distributed systems, are reshaping cities.