Assessing the governance of the health policy-making process using a new governance tool: The case of Lebanon

Background: In the international agenda, it has become common to assert that the assessment of health system governance using a practical tool is crucial. This approach can help us better understand how health systems are being steered as well as to identify gaps in the decision-making process and their causes. The authors developed a new assessment tool, the Health Policymaking Governance Guidance Tool (HP-GGT), that was designed to be conceptually sound and practical. This tool enables policy-makers and stakeholders to systematically review and assess health system governance at policy-making level. This article presents first use of the HP-GGT in Lebanon, together with generated results, recommendations, and discusses how these results improve governance practices when initiating new health policy formulation processes.Methods: The HP-GGT, which is a multidimensional structured tool, was used retrospectively to assess and review the process used to develop a new mental health strategy; this process was compared against consensus-based good governance principles, focusing on participation, transparency, accountability, information and responsiveness. The assessment was conducted through face-to-face interviews with 11 key informants who were involved in the development of the strategy.Results: The HP-GGT enabled policy-makers to reflect on their governance practices when developing a mental health strategy and was able to identify key areas of strengths and weaknesses using good governance practice checklists given by the questions. The insights generated from the assessment equipped the national policy-makers with a better understanding of the practice and meaning of policy-making governance. Identifying weaknesses to be addressed in future attempts to develop other national health policies helped in this regard. Using the tool also increased awareness of alternative good practices among policy-makers and stakeholders.Conclusions: Assessing a health policy formulation process from a governance perspective is essential for improved policy-making. The HP-GGT was able to provide a general overview and an in-depth assessment of a policy formulation process related to governance issues according to international good practices that should be applied while formulating health policies in any field. The HP-GGT was found to be a practical tool that was useful for policy-makers when used in Lebanon and awaits applications in other low- and middle-income countries to further show its validity and utility

The Impact of Ukrainian Crisis on the Connectedness of Stock Index in Asian Economies

The main aim of this study is to measure the dynamic connectedness and spillover effects among emerging stock markets in Asia and the developed stock markets of the US and Europe in the ongoing Ukrainian crisis. The paper also aims to provide a comparative analysis of return and volatility spillovers during the global financial crisis in 2008, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Ukrainian crisis. This paper utilizes the multiple structural beak test of Bai & Perron (2003) and also depicts the risk and return transmissions among these markets using the Diebold & Yilmaz (2012) method. The main outcomes of this study indicate that the stock markets in Asia are less affected by the political crisis in Ukraine as compared to the previous effects during the GFC and COVID-19 periods. The results also show that sensitivity of Asian financial markets to global shocks has been weakened in the wake of the Ukrainian crisis in favour of increased resilience of Asian stock indices to external shocks. These results carry an important implication for international and local investors as well as for policy makers in Asia, where investors have greater potentials for portfolio diversify and risk reduction across Asian markets. Doi: 10.28991/ESJ-2023-07-02-04 Full Text: PD

Novel Scheduling Algorithm for 3GPP Downlink LTE Cellular Network

AbstractLong Term Evolution is standardized by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project to provide a high data rate up to 100 Mbps and 50 Mbps for downlink and uplink transmission respectively and can operate in different bandwidths ranging from 1.4MHz up to 20MHz. The incorporated scheduling mechanisms can significantly contribute to this goal. Scheduling mechanism is the process of allocated the resources (Time and Frequency) to users transmitting different flows in same time. In this paper, a novel scheduling algorithm is presented, modeled and compare to basic scheduler used in downlink LTE transmission, such as Round Robin, Max Rate and Proportional fair schedulers. Simulation results, presented in this paper, show that the newly proposed algorithm improves system capacity as compare with Proportional Fair scheduler with guaranty of 80% fairness between all users

Use of health systems evidence by policymakers in eastern mediterranean countries: views, practices, and contextual influences

BACKGROUND: Health systems evidence can enhance policymaking and strengthen national health systems. In the Middle East, limited research exists on the use of evidence in the policymaking process. This multi-country study explored policymakers’ views and practices regarding the use of health systems evidence in health policymaking in 10 eastern Mediterranean countries, including factors that influence health policymaking and barriers and facilitators to the use of evidence. METHODS: This study utilized a survey adapted and customized from a similar tool developed in Canada. Health policymakers from 10 countries (Algeria, Bahrain, Jordan, Lebanon Oman, Pakistan, Palestine, Sudan, Tunisia, and Yemen) were surveyed. Descriptive and bi-variate analyses were performed for quantitative questions and thematic analysis was done for qualitative questions. RESULTS: A total of 237 policymakers completed the survey (56.3% response rate). Governing parties, limited funding for the health sector and donor organizations exerted a strong influence on policymaking processes. Most (88.5%) policymakers reported requesting evidence and 43.1% reported collaborating with researchers. Overall, 40.1% reported that research evidence is not delivered at the right time. Lack of an explicit budget for evidence-informed health policymaking (55.3%), lack of an administrative structure for supporting evidence-informed health policymaking processes (52.6%), and limited value given to research (35.9%) all limited the use of research evidence. Barriers to the use of evidence included lack of research targeting health policy, lack of funding and investments, and political forces. Facilitators included availability of health research and research institutions, qualified researchers, research funding, and easy access to information. CONCLUSIONS: Health policymakers in several countries recognize the importance of using health systems evidence. Study findings are important in light of changes unfolding in some Arab countries and can help undertake an analysis of underlying transformations and their respective health policy implications including the way evidence will be used in policy decisions

Conception d’un nouveau protocole pour le réseau de capteurs sans fils

dans ce présent papier, nous proposons un nouveau protocole pour le réseau de capteur sans fils. Le défi principal de ce protocole reste d’augmenter la durée de vie de réseau de capteur sans fils. Ce protocole de réseau est dédié pour le réseau de capteur sans fils de grande taille. Pour cela nous exploitons deux aspects, un aspect basé sur la décomposition de réseau de capteur en cluster ou zone et la deuxième repose sur le protocole MAC MIMO coopérative. nous développons un modèle analytique qui vise à calculer la probabilité d’erreur puis nous calculons la consommation d’énergie et le délai de transmission en fonction de la probabilité d’erreur de transmission et le taux d’erreur binaire pour la transmission point à point et MAC MIMO coopérative

The impact of BRICS formation on portfolio diversification : empirical evidence from pre- and post-formation eras

This paper aims at contributing to the international portfolio investment decisions among the emerging BRICS countries where individual and institutional investors seek diversification benefits and to help in advocating policy changes and implementation as a response to the changing dynamics in these countries pre- and post-BRICS formation. Therefore, the context of this paper is aimed towards examining the short term causalities and long term integration among the BRICS stock market pre- and post-BRICS formation. The research applies the Augmented Dicker-Fuller (ADF) and Philips-Perron tests (PP) tests to analyze stationarity among the selected variables. The pre- and post-BRICS formation long-term linear relationship is investigated using Johansen and Juselius cointegration test while the Granger Causality is applied to assess the direction of the causality between the stock market indices. The study also extends the investigation by employing the impulse response function and variance decomposition to evaluate the reaction of each of the BRICS market to a shock from other BRICS stock markets. Weekly stock market indices of BRICS countries were used covering the period from January 2003 to December 2018. One key finding is that the degree of financial integration among the BRICS stock markets has moderately strengthened in the post-BRICS formation period compared to the pre-BRICS formation period. Another significant finding is that the Chinese stock market are mostly independent from other BRICS markets in the two aforementioned sub-periods, implying diversification benefits for the international investors both in the short and the long run. Further, the results also reveal a unidirectional causal relationship from the Russian stock market to its BRICS counterparts in both periods. Finally, the overall results show an increased responsiveness of stock markets in BRICS countries to shocks in each other after the formation of the bloc as compared to pre- formation period

An examination of the banking efficiency of the BRICS countries : a perspective derived from the oil price volatility

This study examines the influence of Oil Price Volatility on Banks efficiency within the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) noting the importance of the banking sector efficiency as a tool to ensure financial stability in the region. Being able to measure efficiency levels in banks determines how successful a bank is in managing its operations and achieving its goals. A sample data of 112 banks was selected using the Bank Scope database over the time interval 2003 to 2018 to inspect banking sector relative efficiency following a non-parametric methodology known as Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). The paper applies a two-stage model to process the empirical results consisting in using the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to identify the scores of banks efficiency at a first stage (Stage 1) and determining how volatility in Oil price has impact on these scores of efficiencies on a second stage (Stage 2). Findings of the study indicate that the Chinese banking system shows the highest efficiency (90%), followed by the South Africa (87%), followed by the Brazilian and Indian banking system with efficiency level of (77%), the Russian bank industry revealed the lowest efficient banking system with level of efficiency (50%)

Scheduling and Communication Schemes for Decentralized Federated Learning

Federated learning (FL) is a distributed machine learning paradigm in which a large number of clients coordinate with a central server to learn a model without sharing their own training data. One central server is not enough, due to problems of connectivity with clients. In this paper, a decentralized federated learning (DFL) model with the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm has been introduced, as a more scalable approach to improve the learning performance in a network of agents with arbitrary topology. Three scheduling policies for DFL have been proposed for communications between the clients and the parallel servers, and the convergence, accuracy, and loss have been tested in a totally decentralized mplementation of SGD. The experimental results show that the proposed scheduling polices have an impact both on the speed of convergence and in the final global model.Comment: 32nd International Conference on Computer Theory and Applications (ICCTA), Alexandria, Egypt, 202

Efficient Hardware Design for Computing Pairings Using Few FPGA In-built DSPs

This paper is devoted to the design of a 258-bit multiplier for computing pairings over Barreto-Naehrig (BN) curves at 128-bit security level. The proposed design is optimized for Xilinx field programmable gate array (FPGA). Each 258-bit integer is represented as a polynomial with five, 65 bit signed integer, coefficients. Exploiting this splitting we designed a pipelined 65-bit multiplier based on new Karatsuba- Ofman variant using non-standard splitting to fit to the Xilinx embedded digital signal processor (DSP) blocks. We prototype the coprocessor in two architectures pipelined and serial on a Xilinx Virtex-6 FPGA using around 17000 slices and 11 DSPs in the pipelined design and 7 DSPs in the serial. The pipelined 128-bit pairing is computed in 1. 8 ms running at 225MHz and the serial is performed in 2.2 ms running at 185MHz. To the best of our knowledge, this implementation outperforms all reported hardware designs in term of DSP use. Keywords