Does Women?s Status Matter for Food Security? Evidence from Bangladesh

Using data from a survey of Bangladeshi households, this paper investigates the link between female status and food security. Employing three different indicators of female status ? husband?s and wife?s assets brought at marriage, female share of household income and a composite index of women empowerment, the paper finds evidence of women?s status influencing food security. By raising the level of food security for some disadvantaged women?s groups female status is also found to be instrumental in mitigating the extent of gender-based within-household discrimination. The findings reveal that inferences drawn about food security by observing the changes in various non-food budget shares could be misleading or overemphasized.food security, women?s status, intra-household distribution, gender discrimination, Bangladesh

Domestic Violence Against Women: Its Determinants and Implications for Gender Resource Allocation

Using data from a survey of Bangladeshi households, this paper explores the determinants of domestic violence against women as well as its implications for the resources allocated to women. The findings reveal that higher education of women and that of their husbands, and better socioeconomic status of households are crucial in reducing the risk of violence, while, contrary to general perceptions, women?s involvement in income generating activities and participation in NGO programmes do not have any similar effects. When resources allocated to women with and without the experiences of domestic violence are compared, no statistically significant difference between the mean calories consumed by the two groups can be found. However, there is robust evidence of women subject to domestic violence receiving significantly lower calories from the preferred food items such as, fish, meat, eggs, drinks and dairy products. Furthermore, this group of women is allocated significantly lower amounts of household food and non-food expenses compared to their counterparts who do not report domestic violence against them.domestic violence, intra-household distribution, Bangladesh

Macroeconomic Effects of Fiscal Policies: Empirical Evidence from Bangladesh, China, Indonesia and the Philippines

This paper studies macroeconomic effects of fiscal policies in four Asian countries - Bangladesh, China, Indonesia, and the Philippines - by means of structural macroeconometric model simulations. It is found that short-term fiscal multipliers from an untargeted increase in government expenditure are positive but much less than those from an increased expenditure targeted to capital spending. The multiplier effects from fiscal expansion via a tax rate reduction are found to be typically much less than through higher spending. The effectiveness of automatic stabilizers in general, and more specifically whether expenditure or tax-side stabilizer is more effective, differs across countries.Fiscal policy, Growth, Public finance, Deficit

Seluge++: A Secure Over-the-Air Programming Scheme in Wireless Sensor Networks

Over-the-air dissemination of code updates in wireless sensor networks have been researchers’ point of interest in the last few years, and, more importantly, security challenges toward the remote propagation of code updating have occupied the majority of efforts in this context. Many security models have been proposed to establish a balance between the energy consumption and security strength, having their concentration on the constrained nature of wireless sensor network (WSN) nodes. For authentication purposes, most of them have used a Merkle hash tree to avoid using multiple public cryptography operations. These models mostly have assumed an environment in which security has to be at a standard level. Therefore, they have not investigated the tree structure for mission-critical situations in which security has to be at the maximum possible level (e.g., military applications, healthcare). Considering this, we investigate existing security models used in over-the-air dissemination of code updates for possible vulnerabilities, and then, we provide a set of countermeasures, correspondingly named Security Model Requirements. Based on the investigation, we concentrate on Seluge, one of the existing over-the-air programming schemes, and we propose an improved version of it, named Seluge++, which complies with the Security Model Requirements and replaces the use of the inefficient Merkle tree with a novel method. Analytical and simulation results show the improvements in Seluge++ compared to Seluge

The Effect of Maternal Tetanus Immunization on Children’s Schooling Attainment in Matlab, Bangladesh: Follow-up of a Randomized Trial

We investigate the effects of ante-natal maternal vaccination against tetanus on the schooling attained by children in Bangladesh. Maternal vaccination prevents the child from acquiring tetanus at birth through blood infection and substantially reduces infant mortality and may prevent impairment in children who would otherwise acquire tetanus but survive. We follow up on a 1974 randomized trial of maternal tetanus toxoid, looking at outcomes for children born in the period 1975-1979. We find significant schooling gains from maternal tetanus vaccination for children whose parents had no schooling, showing a large impact on a small number of children.Vaccination, tetanus, schooling, education, Bangladesh

An Integrated Cyber Security Risk Management Approach for a Cyber-Physical System

A cyber-physical system (CPS) is a combination of physical system components with cyber capabilities that have a very tight interconnectivity. CPS is a widely used technology in many applications, including electric power systems, communications, and transportation, and healthcare systems. These are critical national infrastructures. Cybersecurity attack is one of the major threats for a CPS because of many reasons, including complexity and interdependencies among various system components, integration of communication, computing, and control technology. Cybersecurity attacks may lead to various risks affecting the critical infrastructure business continuity, including degradation of production and performance, unavailability of critical services, and violation of the regulation. Managing cybersecurity risks is very important to protect CPS. However, risk management is challenging due to the inherent complex and evolving nature of the CPS system and recent attack trends. This paper presents an integrated cybersecurity risk management framework to assess and manage the risks in a proactive manner. Our work follows the existing risk management practice and standard and considers risks from the stakeholder model, cyber, and physical system components along with their dependencies. The approach enables identification of critical CPS assets and assesses the impact of vulnerabilities that affect the assets. It also presents a cybersecurity attack scenario that incorporates a cascading effect of threats and vulnerabilities to the assets. The attack model helps to determine the appropriate risk levels and their corresponding mitigation process. We present a power grid system to illustrate the applicability of our work. The result suggests that risk in a CPS of a critical infrastructure depends mainly on cyber-physical attack scenarios and the context of the organization. The involved risks in the studied context are both from the technical and nontechnical aspects of the CPS