Misuse of Antibiotics and Potential Economic Loss in Bangladesh

Misuse of antibiotics is a global phenomenon. It is an increasingly serious threat to global public health that requires action across all government sectors and society. This study is an attempt to determine the rate of inappropriate use or misuse of antibiotics and understand potential economic loss in Bangladesh. This study uses simulated patients and they behaved like ordinary patients when they visited the doctors and collected prescriptions from them. The study finds that of total, 71.2% prescriptions contained antibiotic drug. The more the male doctors the higher the prescription of antibiotics. Doctors in sub-district level prescribe more antibiotics than the doctors in Dhaka urban periphery and public hospitals. This misuse of antibiotics has serious potential economic loss as it will lead to the development of antibacterial resistance coinciding with the increase in drug-resistant organisms which may result in the use of more toxic drugs. It will impose unnecessary costs on the patients and obviously reduce productivity of labor which is a very important factor of economic growth thus economic development. Keywords: Misuse, Antibiotics, Side effects, Economic growth.

Monetary union for the development process in the East African community: business cycle synchronization approach

This paper empirically examines the suitability of monetary union in East African community members namely, Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda, on the basis of business cycle synchronization. This research considers annual GDP (gross domestic product) data from IMF (international monetary fund) for the period of 1980 to 2010. In order to extract the business cycles and trends, the study uses HP (Hodrick-Prescott) and the BP (band pass) filters. After identifying the cycles and trends of the business cycle, the study considers cross country correlation analysis and analysis of variance technique to examine whether EAC (East African community) countries are characterized by synchronized business cycles or not. The results show that four EAC countries (Burundi, Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda) among five countries are having similar pattern of business cycle and trend from the last ten years of the formation of the EAC. The research concludes that these countries, except Rwanda, do not differ significantly in transitory or cycle components but do differ in permanent components especially in growth trend

National development and student politics in Bangladesh

Student politics is one of the ignored areas in the international scholarly debate. In the late 1960's to early 1970's, some authors made some contributions in the context of South America and Africa. In 1968, Altbach also made very little contribution on the Indian student politics and its impact on development. The institutions of HE (higher education) in southern Asia is experiencing a high volume of student politics and teacher politics. In the discourse of institutional management and national development, people often make links between teacher politics and students while they talk informally. As the academics of HE in Southern Asia whom mainly conduct research are also rigorously involved with the politics, therefore, they often ignore this area. Factually, student politics has a serious impact on the institutional management and education system itself. This also provides a high volume of impact on the national development, education and state business in overall. This paper explores the impact of students' involvement in 'party politics' on national development and state business of education in Bangladesh, while answering some specific research questions through the data gained from an empirical research work

What offers solution to the poverty reduction of the Haor people in Bangladesh? Seasonal migration or a new inshore economic livelihood policy

Researches from different disciplines are yet to provide a concrete standpoint on causal relationship between poverty and migration. With a market driven attitude, seasonal migration has been increasing dramatically with a hope to reduce the poverty. So far, research has not confirmed if migration helps to reduce poverty or poverty is forced to be migrated. Whatever the fact, it would be realistic that the local community will not migrate if they find better work opportunities with higher productivity for their livings. In this paper, an effort is made to discover the possible ways to make the local community in the Haor area to be productive, ensuring their stay in their homes. A development economic policy guideline is aimed to be provided in order to make the possible ways functional. Along drawing individual and household profile of migrant, a mixed method suggests that some interventions of food stamp, infrastructure facilities and cooperative activities are necessary for in-situ socio-economic development of the Haor people. The outcomes of the study are reliable to apply in underprivileged ecological areas in other developing countries alike

Contextualization of science knowledge: a case study of Malaysian and Nigerian serving and pre-service teachers

This study was meant to ascertain how well Malaysian and Nigerian university science education undergraduates and their counterparts (already on the field) contextualize science concepts they are learning or have learned and how well they can help the students they teach connect science with reallife in their teaching. The designs employed in the study were survey and causal comparative. The sample consisted of 240 subjects, 120 from each country drawn from serving and pre-service teachers from Malaysia and Nigeria using stratified sampling technique. Two research questions were raised to guide the study and two hypotheses formulated for testing. A validated instrument labeled contextualization of science knowledge was used for data collection. The psychometric properties and the reliability coefficient of the test were determined for content and construct validity through a pilot study. The instrument was administered and the data collected were analyzed using t-test. The findings are that: a large proportion of the respondents could not contextualize science since the total mean scores of the entire sample are less than half, there was a significant difference in the contextualization of science knowledge among the undergraduates with the Malaysian sample performing better and no significant difference among the serving science teachers

Poverty and sustainable livelihoods in the seasonally submerged haor area of Netrokona District, Bangladesh / Talukder Golam Rabby

Being geographically remote, ecologically vulnerable and environmentally isolated, poverty is severe and livelihood is onerous in the northeastern Haor area in Bangladesh. Thus, this research which explores the nexus of poverty and livelihood in the Haor area focuses on four specific objectives: characterizing poverty and the poor, causes and consequences of poverty; examining the income determinants of the poor households; exploring the dynamics of poverty and the impact of seasonal domestic migration of the poor on poverty. A mixed methodology of research is applied to analyze the cross-sectional primary data collected through field surveys. The results demonstrate that the incidence of income poverty is 73% among the sample households of which 29% and 44% can be considered the moderately and extremely poor, respectively. The poor are primarily uneducated, landless, unemployed and female-headed households with the latter two groups constituting the extremely poor strata. The household income of the poor households is highly influenced by public credit accessibility, remittances (by migrant household members), dry season income, household size, employment status and age of household head. The poverty dynamics reveal that the exposure of resource pauperization to poverty has increased overtime in the Haor area. The monsoonal deluge (in the wet season), mono-cropping, flashfloods, seasonal unemployment, capital deficiencies and policy weaknesses are among the most important causes of poverty in the Haor area. The poor who are uneducated and capital deficient resort to seasonal domestic migration as an income diversifying strategy but one which is largely ineffective. Persistent poverty has serious consequences on the livelihood strategies of the poor; as current poverty reduction strategies in the Haor area have limited impact, there is a need to examine and formulate appropriate policy interventions aimed at generating steady sources of income for the poor households. Among others, they include revitalizing Haor agriculture, establishing non-farm sector work opportunities (handicrafts, transportation, communication, storage services, etc), investment in infrastructure facilities and cooperative activities. The theoretical and empirical findings of this research can provide inputs for policymakers to create a long term framework for poverty reduction and sustainable livelihood development for the poor households in the Haor area of Bangladesh

Different economic and policy perspectives in micro population for sustainable development: A study of the Haor livelihood in Bangladesh

Criteria of development approaches and their schemata have evolved out of historical social practices. Interpretation of social events is guided and constrained by the prevailing rationality which itself reflects the dominant constellation of power. With the course of change of time and modernization, a number of development approaches have taken place especially in the context of developing nations. However, the discourse of the development of a less number of populations who are having geographically disadvantaged, unskilled and physically challenged positions is always seen as critical, since it requires high investment from public subsidy but provides less public and private returns. Factually, without the development of these populations, state mission will be missed out. Considering this is an issue for research in the area of public policy and development studies, this study was conducted in Bangladesh with a scientific adoption of both quantitative and qualitative methods, intending to discover an approach that helps the particular group to develop without hampering the return to the investment made by the state. Although, this study was conducted in Bangladesh, the development approach discovered can be used to many other developing country contexts