Relationship Between Socio-Economic Values and Wellbeing: An Overview Research in Asia

This paper investigates ten Asian nations to consider how socio-economic values affect happiness and satisfaction. Moreover, it considers whether economic factors can strongly affect wellbeing under certain conditions. Males in Asia are said they have more opportunities to obtain higher happiness and satisfaction but it does not happen in the current study. Unemployment has negative and significant impact with regard to happiness and satisfaction in developing countries yet it does not have the same effect in developed nations. It is believed cultural value positively affects happiness and satisfaction in East Asia but the result in the models is different with no clear relationship between this variable and wellbeing. Furthermore, some people declare that a relative increase of income compared to the lowest group will lead them to lower life satisfaction.     

Modified genetic algorithm-based clustering for probability density functions

This article modifies two internal validity measures and applies them to evaluate the quality of clustering for probability density functions (pdfs). Based on these measures, we propose a new modified genetic algorithm called GA-CDF to establish the suitable clusters for pdfs. The proposed algorithm is tested by four numerical examples including two synthetic data sets and two real data sets. These examples illustrate the superiority of proposed algorithm over some existing algorithms in evaluating the internal or external validity measures. It demonstrates the feasibility and applicability of the GA-CDF for practical problems in data mining.     

Credit and Ethnic Consumption Inequality in the Central Highlands of Vietnam

Social Indicators Research - Credit is commonly considered an important instrument to relieve financial capital constraints of poor households and subsequently to improve their welfare. However,...     

Welfare Index of Migrant Workers in the Gulf: the Case of Qatar

In December 2010, Qatar won the rights to host the 2022 FIFA World Cup games. The FIFA announcement came with increasing pressure from international human rights organizations, media and other groups for Qatar to reform its labour law, which governs the lives and working conditions of foreign workers in the country. Although Qatar continues to develop and implement major reforms to its labour laws, until now there was no one unique tool based on survey data to evaluate the impact of the government’s policies on guest workers. The objective of this article is to present the Qatar Guest Workers’ Welfare Index (GWWI),¹ a multi-dimensional comprehensive tool based on survey data of migrant workers developed by the Social and Economic Survey Research Institute (SESRI). In addition to assessing and tracking the welfare of this population, the objective of the index is to identify areas of improvement to guide policy formulation.     

Donating Time or Money? The Effects of Religiosity and Social Capital on Civic Engagement in Qatar

Few studies have examined the role of religiosity and social capital on civic engagement in the context of a Muslim country. In this paper, we explore the impact of religiosity and social capital on charitable donations and volunteerism in Qatar. Drawing on a nationally representative survey from Qatar, we consider various attitudinal and behavioral measures for capturing religiosity and social capital. The results indicate that, even after controlling for a wide range of demographic variables, behavioral measures have a stronger effect than attitudes. Individuals who regularly perform daily prayers are more likely to donate than those individuals who simply describe themselves as religious. Similarly, individuals who are more active in their neighborhood engagement are more likely to volunteer than those who merely report high levels of social trust. These results suggest that when it comes to the relationship between religiosity, social capital and civic engagement, individual behavior is much more predictive than attitudes alone. We also find that even in the case of Qatar, where citizen wealth has rapidly increased in the last few decades, there is little evidence of substitution effects: citizens do not appear to trade-off or substitute between time and money. Instead, more religious and active citizens are likely to do both.     

Growth,inequality and poverty in Vietnam: How did trade liberalisation help the poor, 2002–2008

Using the Vietnamese Living Standards Surveys for 2002, 2004, 2006 and 2008, we explore how provinces with differential access to trade liberalisation reforms differ in their pro-poor growth performance in Vietnam. Using both non-parametric and parametric estimation, we find strong, robust evidence of pro-poor growth in provinces with greater exposure to trade liberalisation. Using censored and uncensored regressions, the study also shows that increased wages play a critical role in this outcome. Our analysis enables identification of the core mechanisms through which the poor materialise their gains from trade-driven growth in a transition economy.     

Proxy reporting in education surveys: factors influencing accurate reporting in the 2012 Qatar Education Study

Abstract

Proxy reporting is a common practice during survey data collection to increase response rates while reducing fieldwork costs, and agreement between proxies and self-reports is critical to make reliable and valid inferences. This study is the first to unpack what influences proxy accuracy in a non-Western setting using data from the 2012 Qatar Education Study. We find that agreement is a function of a student’s grade in school, grades, a parent’s level of education, and the interaction between immigration status and parent education. These findings suggest in multicultural contexts, agreement may vary based on factors beyond what is typically accounted when examining the components of reporting error as a result of using proxies over self-reports.     

The inverse 1-center problem on trees with variable edge lengths under Chebyshev norm and Hamming distance

This paper addresses the problem of modifying the edge lengths of a tree in minimum total cost such that a prespecified vertex becomes the 1-center of the perturbed tree. This problem is called the inverse 1-center problem on trees. We focus on the problem under Chebyshev norm and Hamming distance. From special properties of the objective functions, we can develop combinatorial algorithms to solve the problem. Precisely, if there does not exist any vertex coinciding with the prespecified vertex during the modification of edge lengths, the problem under Chebyshev norm or bottleneck Hamming distance is solvable in \(O(n\log n)\) time, where \(n+1\) is the number of vertices of the tree. Dropping this condition, the problem can be solved in \(O(n^{2})\) time.     

Information dependency: Strong consistency of Darbellay–Vajda partition estimators

The Darbellay–Vajda partition scheme is a well known method to estimate the information dependency. This estimator belongs to a class of data-dependent partition estimators. We would like to prove that with some simple conditions, the Darbellay–Vajda partition estimator is a strong consistency for the information dependency estimation of a bivariate random vector. This result is an extension of 20 and 21 work which gives some simple conditions to confirm that the Gessaman's partition estimator and the tree-quantization partition estimator, other estimators in the class of data-dependent partition estimators, are strongly consistent.