Search Results (2,304)

To address the challenges of low efficiency, high labour intensity, severe fish damage, and insufficient intelligence in adult fish harvesting within industrialised aquaculture systems, this study developed an integrated harvesting and sorting system incorporating bottom-drain fish collection, automatic herding, a modified screw-lifting mechanism, and digital grading. The system employs a bottom-discharge port on the culture tank—controlled by an electric ball valve—to replace manual net-herding, enabling simultaneous fish-and-water drainage. An automatic herding cart with a retractable net (equipped with surface floats and bottom weights) achieves bottom-hugging herding to prevent fish escape. A multi-column convolutional neural network (MCNN) fish-density recognition model was deployed above the collection tank to adaptively adjust the push-board position, thereby avoiding compression injury. The screw blade head was modified by removing the inlet-edge portions to eliminate the fish-cutting zone, reducing the mean damage rate from 1.8% to 1.32% (N = 12; 66.7% of trials recorded zero damage). Twelve repeated full-scale harvesting trials were conducted using largemouth bass (Micropterus salmoides; body length 20–30 cm, body mass 300–500 g) in a 2.5 m diameter PP circular tank. Results showed a mean collection efficiency of 95.94 ± 3.33% (p < 0.001), a mean damage rate of 1.32 ± 1.96%, and a mean sorting accuracy of 96.83 ± 2.50% (p = 0.014). The MCNN model attained a recognition accuracy of 78–85%. The proposed system realises automated, intelligent, and low-damage fish harvesting, providing technical support for fully automated production-line aquaculture. Full article

Income inequality remains a persistent structural challenge in advanced economies, with important consequences for economic stability, social cohesion, and the effectiveness of public policy. This study investigates the determinants of income inequality in the United Kingdom over the period 1980–2021 by combining ARDL, FMOLS, and NARDL approaches to assess long-run equilibrium relationships and potential nonlinear distributional effects. The ARDL bounds test confirms the presence of a stable long-run cointegrating relationship between the Gini index and its socioeconomic determinants, indicating that fiscal conditions, labour market dynamics, economic development, and income structure move together over time. The FMOLS estimates show that GDP per capita and unemployment are positively associated with inequality, whereas public social spending, government expenditure on education, tax revenue, and the income share of the fourth quintile are negatively related to the Gini index in the long run. These results underline the importance of redistribution, human capital investment, and labour market stability in moderating income disparities. The NARDL estimates suggest directionally different responses to positive and negative changes in the upper-middle-income share. Positive changes are associated with lower inequality (−0.931), while negative changes are associated with higher inequality (0.232); however, neither effect is statistically significant. The Wald test likewise fails to reject long-run symmetry (χ²(1) = 0.212, p = 0.646). Overall, the findings support a stable long-run inequality framework while indicating only limited evidence of asymmetric distributional adjustment in the United Kingdom. Full article

Background/Objectives: This study evaluated the effects of a role-reversal simulation-based educational intervention on midwifery students’ emotional availability and responsiveness in intrapartum care and explored their experiences of the simulation through qualitative inquiry. Methods: A mixed-methods quasi-experimental one-group pretest–post-test design was used. Forty-nine midwifery students participated in a simulation in which they alternately assumed the roles of a labouring woman and a midwife. Qualitative data were obtained through reflective forms and focus group interviews and analyzed using Braun and Clarke’s six-step thematic analysis. Results: Post-intervention emotional availability and responsiveness scores significantly increased compared with pre-intervention scores (p < 0.001), with a large effect size (Cohen’s d = 1.25). Qualitative findings suggested that students perceived greater empathic awareness, a deeper understanding of women’s labour experiences, and increased awareness of respectful and woman-centred care. Participants also described role-reversal simulation and reflective learning as valuable experiences that promoted emotional engagement and greater awareness of their professional roles. Conclusions: Role-reversal simulation may be a useful educational strategy for strengthening emotional availability and responsiveness in intrapartum care among midwifery students. The qualitative findings further suggest that this learning experience may support empathy-related awareness and reflective learning. Full article

This article examines whether treaty-based and cooperation-oriented institutions can perform complementary functions in Indo-Pacific economic governance. It compares the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) and the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity (IPEF), while treating the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) and other regional mechanisms as contextual alternatives. Drawing on a structured 53-document corpus of legal, policy, institutional, scholarly, and project-level materials, the study maps overlapping participation and agreement-specific legal status, then analyses labour and supply-chain governance in Malaysia and Vietnam and an attribution boundary case on clean-energy cooperation in Indonesia. It develops selective complementarity as an issue-specific evaluative framework distinguishing thematic overlap, functional differentiation, prospective compatibility, operational interaction, and institutionalised interaction. The findings show functional differentiation and prospective compatibility in Malaysia and Vietnam, but no cross-framework linkage, transmission, uptake, or additional implementation value was documented within the defined corpus and period. Indonesia demonstrates that policy alignment does not convert bilateral, development-finance, or adjacent regional initiatives into IPEF activities. Japan is best understood as a cross-case facilitating actor because the evidence does not establish a stable bridging mechanism between the two frameworks. By setting clear evidentiary thresholds and identifying evidence that would count against complementarity, the study contributes to research on regime complexity, institutional interaction, and sustainability-oriented regionalism. Full article

The construction industry remains among the most dangerous occupations in the world and safety management in this industry remains hierarchical in nature, being designed by engineers, regulatory agencies, and site managers and not by those who actually face the highest risk of danger. This paper argues that this asymmetry in who gets to design safety is systemic, arising from the intersection of organisational hierarchy, national power distance, and multi-tier subcontracting, all of which erode both accountability and worker voice. Drawing on a theoretical framework that integrates the safety-voice, power-distance, and systems-theoretic accident model and processes (STAMP) literatures with a structural analysis of Istanbul’s construction sector, the paper shows how legal, contractual, and cultural mechanisms suppress the feedback processes that resilience-oriented safety management depends on. Drawing on Turkish labour-law thresholds for union recognition, subcontracting data, and a case of worker protest during the construction of one of Istanbul’s largest infrastructure projects, the paper identifies three mechanisms of exclusion: statutory representation thresholds that structurally exclude construction workers, subcontracting chains that diffuse responsibility for safety outcomes away from the workers who bear the risk, and organisational hierarchies that discourage safety voice long before it reaches any formal channel. The paper concludes with a set of design principles for reintegrating worker feedback into safety control structures, offered as a contribution to resilience engineering practice. Full article

Labour markets across Europe increasingly describe workers through skills rather than job titles, and a growing number of large language model (LLM)-based tools now claim to extract these skills automatically from unstructured text at scale. Among these, ESCOX has gained particular traction for its open-source, taxonomy-aligned design, yet like any LLM-based system it remains susceptible to hallucination, prompt sensitivity, and non-deterministic output, risks that are rarely quantified before such tools are deployed in practice. The European Skills, Competences, Qualifications, and Occupations (ESCO) classification provides the standardised reference against which this risk can be measured, but no study has yet benchmarked an ESCO-aligned LLM extractor against an independent, expert-labelled dataset at scale. This study addresses that gap. Candidate skills generated by ESCOX are compared against reference skills already assigned to job vacancies on the EURES portal by national labour-market experts, using job-by-skill matrices to quantify agreement and skill co-occurrence networks to characterise how the two sets diverge structurally. Results reveal the extent to which ESCOX’s automatic output aligns with expert judgement and where systematic divergences occur. These findings offer HR practitioners, policymakers, and labour-market researchers an evidence-based basis for deciding when ESCOX’s output can be trusted directly and when expert oversight remains necessary. Full article

Global labour shortages in the agricultural sector, combined with diminishing arable land and a growing population, are driving investment in autonomous agricultural machinery. Autonomous systems that can navigate crop environments and perform planting, treatment, and harvesting alongside humans are required, but the gap between published research and commercially deployed systems remains wide across most operational scenarios. Why are agricultural robots still not widely deployed in real farms despite decades of research in autonomous navigation and path planning, and what is preventing full farm autonomy? This paper reviews the principal enabling technologies for autonomous agricultural integration, with a specific focus on path planning as the differentiator between research-stage and deployed systems. Current research in human–robot integration, open-field navigation, row identification and following, crop sensing, and power efficiency is synthesised and evaluated against a deployability criterion. A Deployability Assessment Framework is introduced, comprising structured tables that assign Technology Readiness Levels to twelve path-planning families and benchmark eleven commercial and research platforms against field-validated accuracy data. The analysis shows that point-to-point GNSS navigation has reached TRL 9 with over one million commercial units deployed, vision-based crop row following is at TRL 5–7 depending on crop and season, and whole-farm autonomy with dynamic re-planning is at TRL 3–5. The primary barriers are the absence of standardised evaluation benchmarks, the failure of perception models to generalise across seasons and crop types, and the decoupling of terrain and slip feedback from global path planners. Our review reveals that open-field GNSS navigation is commercially mature, but true whole-farm agricultural autonomy remains unsolved because current systems are not robust enough across seasons, terrain, sensing conditions, and operational transitions. Full article

Comparative welfare research studies social protection within national regimes and asks how responsibility is shared between the state, the market and the family. That perspective captures only part of transnational family life. Families living across borders need to bring together income, care and practical knowledge while also dealing with different legal and institutional settings. This study develops two connected ideas—social corridors of migration and family decommodification potential—and examines them through an integrative synthesis of research with a focus on Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Greater security for one person may rest on another person’s action in the form of either unpaid care or continuing labour-market dependence. Family decommodification potential is therefore regarded as both conditional and sensitive to how benefits and costs are distributed within the family. Full article

Community-based leisure may support newcomer women’s well-being and belonging, yet its role within settlement practice remains underexamined. This manuscript presents findings from a larger community-based research project that explored Iranian newcomer women’s (aged 30–55) experiences navigating leisure, community life, and well-being during their settlement in Ottawa, Canada. In this manuscript, the discussion focuses on data collected from virtual feedback consultation sessions with two women who participated in co-designed leisure activities, and an executive from a non-profit settlement service organization serving Iranian and Farsi-speaking newcomers. Data coding, translation, verification and reflexive thematic analysis guided our qualitative methodological approach, and findings were interpreted within an intersectional feminist framework. Our findings revealed the challenges the participating women faced in balancing employment, caregiving, and household labour while acclimatizing to Canada. The women in this study described leisure as a vital interruption of their layered responsibilities and a chance to connect with others who shared their migration experience. Leisure did not replace formal settlement supports but addressed dimensions of settlement that 33 conventional indicators often miss, including identity loss, unfamiliarity with the city, and 34 the need for connection in a shared language and cultural setting. In this case, the settlement organization functioned as a cultural infrastructure that made participation in public and cultural life accessible for the women who took part. Full article

Understanding the financial characteristics associated with hotel performance is important for competitiveness and managerial decision-making. However, empirical evidence based on objective company-level financial indicators remains limited, particularly in the Croatian hotel sector. This study examines the relationships between labour productivity, firm size, and profitability, as well as financial performance heterogeneity among Croatian hotel companies. Using accounting data for 47 large hotel companies in 2024, the study employs descriptive statistics, Spearman correlation analysis, robust multiple regression, sensitivity analysis, and K-means cluster analysis. The results reveal considerable heterogeneity in financial performance. Labour productivity, measured by value added per employee, is strongly positively associated with profitability in the correlation analysis. However, neither labour productivity nor firm size is statistically significant at the 5% level in the full-sample regression model. Sensitivity analysis excluding one verified but highly influential observation identifies a significant positive association between labour productivity and profitability, indicating sensitivity to firm-level heterogeneity. Cluster analysis identifies two distinct performance profiles, with relatively smaller companies exhibiting higher average labour productivity and profitability. The findings highlight the importance of considering labour productivity, firm size, and firm-level heterogeneity when assessing hotel financial performance and provide a basis for managerial benchmarking and longitudinal research. Full article

Filipino immigrants play a central role in Canada’s essential workforce, particularly in health care, caregiving, and service sectors. This paper examines how their labour market outcomes have changed since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, focusing on employment, exposure to precarious work, and earnings. Using Labour Force Survey data from 2016 to 2025, we compare Filipino immigrants with other major immigrant groups, using Canadian-born workers as a benchmark. The results point to a consistent pattern: since the start of the pandemic, Filipino immigrants became more likely to experience unemployment and to be concentrated in precarious forms of work. At the same time, their earnings did not keep pace with those of Canadian-born workers, resulting in a widening gap. Compared to other immigrant groups, Filipino immigrants stand out as facing a combination of worsening job conditions and slower earnings growth. These findings suggest that the pandemic reshaped the labour market in ways that left Filipino immigrants increasingly vulnerable, despite their central role in essential work. The paper concludes by discussing policy measures that could better protect immigrant workers in future periods of economic disruption. Full article

Certified seed purity is a prerequisite for sustaining the agronomic performance and commercial value of Khao Dawk Mali 105 (KDML-105), Thailand’s premium aromatic rice; however, conventional inspection methods are destructive, labour-intensive, and poorly suited to high-throughput operations. This study developed a non-destructive purity inspection system integrating five-band MSI acquired using a MicaSense RedEdge-MX sensor with three machine learning classifiers: Extra Trees (ET), Random Forest (RF), and Support Vector Machine (SVM). The system was evaluated systematically across four illumination levels (360.90–13,188.46 lx) to discriminate KDML-105 from three morphologically similar contaminating varieties: Chainat-1, RD-6, and RD-15. Two-way ANOVA confirmed that classifier type was the dominant performance determinant (η² = 0.847). Under optimal illumination (L4, 13,188.46 lx), ET achieved the highest accuracy (88.8%), recall (86.6%), and F1-score (88.4%) with a training time of 0.098 s. External validation confirmed model generalisability: KDML-105 seeds were identified with 90.6% accuracy and 95.6% recall, while Chainat-1 and RD-6 yielded accuracies of 85.1% and 90.6%, respectively; RD-15 remained challenging (62.9%; 67.4%) owing to spectral proximity to KDML-105. These findings establish MSI combined with ET classification as a viable, cost-effective approach for automated seed purity screening in certified rice production. Full article

With urban rail transit networks gradually entering a mature stage of development, whether newly added lines and stations can still improve local labour market outcomes remains an important question in transport planning and urban regeneration research. This paper examines light rail transit expansion in three mature UK cities: Manchester, Sheffield, and Nottingham. Using MSOA-level panel data from 2013 to 2024, this study applies a Difference-in-Differences (DID) approach to evaluate the impact of light rail transit expansion on local labour market vulnerability. MSOAs intersecting with the 500-m buffer zones of newly opened light rail stations are defined as the treatment group, while MSOAs not directly affected by light rail expansion are used as the control group. The Claimant Count is used as a proxy for welfare dependency and labour-market vulnerability. The results show that light rail transit expansion significantly reduces the Claimant Count in treated areas, with an estimated decline of approximately 7.52–7.56%. This finding remains robust after adding demographic, socio-economic, and built environment controls, applying MSOA-level clustered standard errors, implementing PSM-DID, and conducting placebo tests. Mechanism analysis further shows that light rail expansion is associated with changes in the functional structure of station areas, including increases in overall POI density and service-oriented facilities, while manufacturing and production-related facilities decline. These findings suggest that light rail expansion may reduce local unemployment-related welfare dependency by improving employment accessibility, alleviating spatial mismatch, and promoting service-sector agglomeration. This study provides new empirical evidence on the socio-economic effects of light rail expansion in mature UK cities. Full article

This study examines how migration influences key issues in the economy and the labour market, and whether the latest EU-level policy initiatives—including the EU Talent Pool initiative—may affect the balance between labour supply and demand. The analysis is based on a structured review of legislation and theoretical literature, with particular attention paid to comparative studies of the EU labour market and international policy assessments produced by organisations such as the OECD and the European Commission. The research also found that migration can contribute positively to economic performance by alleviating labour shortages and improving the match between skills and jobs. Some of the literature analysed in the research also points out that migration may have a negative impact on wages, tending to push them downwards, and that collective labour institutions also face challenges in relation to migration. New platforms such as the EU Talent Pool could be a suitable tool for improving coordination between labour supply and demand. Overall, the study concludes that the economic effects of migration are not uniform; its impact on wages may be negative in certain sectors, but this can be offset and influenced by Member States’ regulatory practices and collective labour law institutions. Full article

This paper examines the macro–micro impact of drought in South Africa using a computable general equilibrium model calibrated to the structure of the South African economy. Drought is represented as a severe supply-side shock: a 50% decline in total factor productivity in agriculture, forestry and fishing. The analysis traces how this shock is transmitted from agricultural production to prices, trade, employment, household income, consumption and welfare. The results show that agricultural output falls by 19.5%, agricultural prices rise by 43.3%, and agricultural imports increase by 84.8% as the economy shifts towards external supply. These sectoral effects generate wider macroeconomic losses, including a 1.0% decline in real GDP, a 1.7% increase in unemployment, a 1.2% fall in household income and a 1.5% reduction in household consumption. Welfare declines for both rural and urban households, but rural households experience larger losses because of their stronger dependence on agriculture, farm income, livestock assets and food markets. The findings show that drought is not only an agricultural or hydrological event; it is an economy-wide and distributional shock transmitted through production, price, trade and labour-market channels. Although imports help to cushion domestic scarcity, they do not fully offset higher prices or welfare losses. Policy responses should therefore combine drought-resilient agricultural investment, water-resource resilience, targeted social protection, food-supply stabilisation and rural livelihood diversification. Full article