Financial inclusion and social protection have been recognised as the primary essential stimuli from the potential they carry as avenues for economic development, especially with respect to reduction in poverty and inequalities, the creation of employment and the enhancement overall welfare and livelihood. However, inclusive access to financial resources and equitable access to social protection interventions have remained a significant concern in Nigeria. In addition, the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic exposed the weakness of Nigeria in all sectors of the economy such as energy, health, education and food systems and low-level inclusive access to financial resources and social protection coverage. On the other hand, this study argues that financial inclusion and social protection has the potential to mitigation shocks orchestrated by the COVID-19 pandemic. This study empirically examines how social protection interventions and access to financial resources responded to COVID-19 pandemic. The study made use of data sourced from the World Bank’s COVID-19 national longitudinal phone survey 2020 and applied the logit regression. The findings show that social protection and access to financial resources significantly associated with the likelihood of shock mitigation during the COVID-19 pandemic. The results show that social protection intervention reduces the probability of being severely affected by shocks by 0.431. Given this result, the study recommends that the government should put more effort into proper social protection intervention to mitigate the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic.
This study examined the role of cryptocurrencies in tourism and their acceptance across EU regions, with particular attention to the digital transformation precipitated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The analysis focuses on the relationship between cryptocurrency acceptance points and the intensity of tourism, highlighting that the acceptance of cryptocurrencies is significantly correlated with tourism services. The literature review highlighted that Web 3.0, especially blockchain technology and decentralized applications, opens new possibilities in tourism, including secure and transparent transactions, and more personalized travel experiences. The research investigated cryptocurrency acceptance points and the intensity of tourism within the EU. The study illuminates that the acceptance of cryptocurrencies significantly correlates with tourism services. The data and methodology demonstrated the analysis methods for examining the relationship between cryptocurrency acceptance points and tourism intensity, including the use of clustering neural networks and Eurostat data utilization. The results showed a positive correlation between the number of cryptocurrency acceptance points and tourism intensity in the EU, affirming the research hypothesis. According to the regression analysis results, each additional cryptocurrency acceptance point is associated with an increase in tourism intensity. The significance of the research lies in highlighting the growing role of digital payment solutions, especially cryptocurrencies, in tourism, and their potential impacts on the EU economy. The analysis supports that the intertwining of tourism and digital financial technologies opens new opportunities in the sector for both providers and tourists.
The artificial intelligence (AI)-based architect's profile's selection (simply iSelection) uses a polymathic mathematical model and AI-subdomains' integration for enabling automated and optimized human resources (HR) processes and activities. HR-related processes and activities in the selection, support, problem-solving, and just-in-time evaluation of a transformation manager's or key team members' polymathic profile (TPProfile). Where a TPProfile can be a classical business manager, transformation manager, project manager, or an enterprise architect. iSelection-related selection processes use many types of artifacts, like critical success factors (CSF), AI-subdomain' integration environments, and an enterprise-wide decision-making system (DMS). iSelection focuses on TPProfiles for various kinds of transformation projects, like the case of the transformation of enterprises' HRs (EHR) processes, activities, and related fields, like enterprise resources planning (ERP) environments, financial systems, human factors (HF) evolution, and AI-subdomains. The iSelection tries to offer a well-defined (or specific) TPProfile, which includes HF's original-authentic capabilities, education, affinities, and possible polymathical characteristics. Such a profile can also be influenced by educational or training curriculum (ETC), which also takes into account transformation projects’ acquired experiences. Knowing that selected TPProfiles are supported by an internal (or external) transformation framework (TF), which can support standard transformation activities, and solving various types of iSelection’s problems. Enterprise transformation projects (simply projects) face extremely high failure rates (XHFR) of about 95%, which makes EHR selection processes very complex.
Based on first-principles methods, the authors of this paper investigate spin thermoelectric effects of one-dimensional spin-based devices consisting of zigzag-edged graphene nanoribbons (ZGNRs), carbon chains and graphene nanoflake. It is found that the spin-down transmission function is suppressed to zero, while the spin-up transmission function is about 0.25. Therefore, an ideal half-metallic property is achieved. In addition, the phonon thermal conductance is obviously smaller than the electronic thermal conductance. Meantime, the spin Seebeck effects are obviously enhanced at the low-temperature regime (about 80K), resulting in the fact that spin thermoelectric figure of merit can reach about 40. Moreover, the spin thermoelectric figure of merit is always larger than the corresponding charge thermoelectric figure of merit. Therefore, the study shows that they can be used to prepare the ideal thermospin devices.
Human resource management practices are crucial, especially in the private healthcare sector. This could be because managing personnel in the healthcare sector is particularly challenging; therefore, meeting every employee's needs is crucial. Recently, the healthcare sector has experienced a scarcity and unbalanced distribution of employees due to job turnover. In addition, employee performance in the private healthcare sector has shown a slight drop due to the dissatisfaction of employees toward human resource practices such as unattractive compensation and rewards packages, bias in performance appraisal, lack of training and development, and many more. Therefore, this study is conducted to examine the impact of human resource practices on employees' job performance. Specifically, there are three main human resource practices observed as factors that contribute to an employee's job performance. The three human resource practices are compensation and benefits, performance appraisal, and training and development. There were four private hospitals operating in Selangor, Malaysia, chosen as a sample for this study. The private hospitals are KPJ Selangor Specialist Hospital, Columbia Asia Hospital Puchong, Assunta Hospital PJ, and Sunway Medical Centre. Out of these four private hospitals, there were about 291 employees working at the front desk: nurses, clinical workers, and administration staff were chosen as respondents in this study. The questionnaires were distributed to the respondents by hand. The data collected was analyzed using SPSS version 29. The findings indicate that employee job performance in Malaysian private hospitals is positively correlated with compensation and benefits. Employees feel motivated by compensation, which encourages them to increase their production and work more efficiently. Additionally, the findings also suggest that performance appraisal and training and development significantly contribute to employee job performance.
In the past three decades, nanotechnology has attracted extensive attention. People have many expectations on the utilization of nanotechnology in medicine, but unfortunately, these expectations are unlikely to be realized. In the field of nanotechnology, the niche for building commercial products has not been developed yet. However, metal nanoparticles have attracted people’s attention since ancient times because of their optical properties, which are very different from those of bulk metals. By understanding the origin of these optical properties and using current technology, these nanoparticles can be manipulated to build a palette. Using micro measurement equipment, the palette can be printed with very good resolution.
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