Agricultural Trade Liberalisation and Economic Growth in Developing Countries: Analysis of Distributional Consequences

The article analyses the impact of agricultural trade liberalisation on economic growth as well as on the welfare of rural livelihoods in developing countries through technological transformation in the agricultural sector. The article, based on existing literature, considers the background and reasons for the policy shift in developing economies away from agricultural protection and toward trade liberalisation. It attempts to shed light on the debate over the distributional consequences resulting from trade liberalisation. It also analyses how agricultural trade policy reforms affect poverty and inequality, since the majority of the population of developing countries is involved with agriculture, and these households are predominantly rural poor and functionally landless. The study found that trade liberalisation in the agricultural sector has had positive impacts on the agricultural sector but has contributed very little to poverty reduction because of the lack of income distribution and inequality measures in the policy sphere. The article might be useful for policy makers and researchers.agriculture, developing countries, growth, inequality, trade liberalisation, Agribusiness, Agricultural and Food Policy, Agricultural Finance, Community/Rural/Urban Development, Crop Production/Industries, Farm Management, Institutional and Behavioral Economics, International Development, Labor and Human Capital, Land Economics/Use, Political Economy, Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies,

Impact of part time work on the academic performance of international students / Ershad Ali

The study analyses the impact of part time work on academic performance of international students while they study. In doing so, the study has conducted a survey among international students who were studying at different tertiary institutes in Auckland region. The study found that there are positive as well as negative impacts on the students’ academic performance while they study as well as work. The study opines that whether the impact would be positive or negative depends on time management between work and study. Findings of the study may be of interest for policy makers, educationists, and researchers

Does Scholarship Scheme Contribute to Gender Parity in Female Education? The Case of Secondary Education in Bangladesh

Gender parity in education plays an important role in socio-economic development of a country where the government policies and procedures are paramount factors for its sustainability. Although Bangladesh has been working to improve the female students enrolment at secondary education since its independence; the achievement is considered insignificant. Recently the country has introduced female secondary education enhancement policy to increase and ensure female students’ enrolment. The paper has analysed the impact of this policy regarding the female secondary education in Bangladesh. Using secondary data, the paper analysed the policy-impacts through changes in the pattern and trend of female secondary student enrolment, the indices of gross enrolment ratio (GER), net enrolment ratio (NER) and net attendance rate (NAR). It also analysed gender disparity index (GDI) and gender parity index (GPI) in secondary education. The paper found that the undertaken policy has positively impacted on female secondary education in Bangladesh but the rate of drop-out and failed students is much higher for female than those for male which raises a question of the effectiveness of the policy. The government should formulate a complementary education policy to achieve desired quantity and quality female secondary education. The findings of the paper might be of interest for researchers, development practitioners and policy makers. Key words: Gender; female; secondary education; education policy; Banglades

Analysis of trade opportunities between Bangladesh and New Zealand / Ershad Ali

Bangladeshi is a low-income developing country in South-East Asia. The country's emerging economy has been earning about 7% GDP growth during the last two decades. On the other hand, New Zealand is a developed western country. Globalization and the competitive business world results from both nations to be more focused on developing trade relationships across the national boundary. This study analyzes the currently ongoing trade relation among these two counties compared to their contribution to the world import and export activities

The Transfer of Sustainable Energy Technology to Developing Countries: Understanding the Need of Bangladesh

This article provides a critical review of the literature on potential Sustainable Energy Technology (SET) transfer as a means of mitigating Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emission, and preserving sustainable development within the rural community of developing countries, such as Bangladesh. A global concern about the rate of increase of GHG emission in the atmosphere makes it evident that it could be reduced through the use of SET rather than fossil fuel. Though SET is available in the global market, it is yet far from the reach of developing countries, which necessitates SET transfer from developed to the developing countries. However, there is a gap between reality and the ways and means of SET transfer suggested and discussed in earlier studies. This paper addresses that gap. Key words: Sustainable energy technology; Greenhouse gas; Banglades

Generative Mixture of Networks

A generative model based on training deep architectures is proposed. The model consists of K networks that are trained together to learn the underlying distribution of a given data set. The process starts with dividing the input data into K clusters and feeding each of them into a separate network. After few iterations of training networks separately, we use an EM-like algorithm to train the networks together and update the clusters of the data. We call this model Mixture of Networks. The provided model is a platform that can be used for any deep structure and be trained by any conventional objective function for distribution modeling. As the components of the model are neural networks, it has high capability in characterizing complicated data distributions as well as clustering data. We apply the algorithm on MNIST hand-written digits and Yale face datasets. We also demonstrate the clustering ability of the model using some real-world and toy examples.Comment: 9 page

Ethnic Composition of Indian Population

India’s present day population is a conglomeration of people belonging to different racial groups with different ethnic backgrounds. The people entered India from different parts of the world at different time periods adopting themselves. India has been a meeting point of different races and tribes from times immemorial. Almost all the major races of the world are visible in India. As a result, India has a varied population and diversified ethnic composition