Links between licit and illicit economies fuel conflict in countries mired in irregular warfare. We argue that in Afghanistan, cultivating poppy and trading drugs bring stability to farmers who face the unintended consequences of haphazard development efforts while lacking alternative livelihoods and security necessary to access markets. Drug trafficking funds the crime-insurgency nexus and gov...

The early awareness of a potential financial distress is crucial to firm’s managers for understanding their clients, suppliers and their own firms, and crucial to fund suppliers for assessing the construction firm’s credit worthiness. The purpose of this paper is to develop a dynamic prediction model for financial distress in construction industry using Data Mining. This research expects to pro...

BACKGROUND Consequences of traumatic brain injury underscore the need to study high-risk groups. Few studies have investigated work-related traumatic brain injuries (WrTBIs) in the construction industry. OBJECTIVE To examine WrTBIs in Ontario for the construction industry compared to other industries. METHODS A retrospective study of individuals who sustained a WrTBI and had a clinical asse...

The global epidemic of tobacco smoking is expected to impact hardest in low- and middle- income countries (LMIC). There is a lack of understanding regarding the policy environments within which tobacco control policies are being introduced particularly in LMIC. This study aims at exploring key stakeholders' beliefs about a tobacco policy in Lao PDR. This is a qualitative case study with a stand...

In this commentary we consider the validity of tobacco industry-funded research on the effects of standardised packaging in Australia. As the first country to introduce standardised packs, Australia is closely watched, and Philip Morris International has recently funded two studies into the impact of the measure on smoking prevalence. Both of these papers are flawed in conception as well as des...

In the area of biodefense, BIO represents a broad mix of small, medium and large companies involved in the research, development and manufacture of medical countermeasures or MCMs. These companies develop and manufacture biological products for the detection, diagnosis, treatment, prevention and delivery of countermeasures in response to chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) eve...

Innovation is an important source of competitiveness and is studied extensively by both the academicians and the practitioners particularly in the last decades. This study is based on the results of an exploratory study conducted in the Northern Marmara region of Turkey covering 184 manufacturing firms. A model is developed to determine the determinants of innovativeness and data is gathered th...

In forecasting the operation of the manufacturing industry in the 21st century, the authors recently proposed “science SQC” as a demonstrative-scientific methodology and discussed its effectiveness on the basis of verification studies conducted by Toyota Motor Corporation. This study outlines a new SQC principle “science SQC”, as a demonstrative-scientific methodology, which enables the princip...

This study was motivated by the view that cultural differences should be taken into account in the management of Korean and foreign workers on construction sites. We identify motivation factors that are influenced by the cultural differences of the laborers, and their effects on productivity. Based on the results of a preliminary survey of field technicians with at least 15 years of work experi...

This study examined the suitability of the motivation techniques used in the construction industry and their underlying theories. These techniques and theories were adapted from psychology and management literature/practice. Though this adaptation was necessary, yet, it queries the basic principle of motivation, which stipulates that motivation depends on the environment, the man and the job ch...