Enacting community health: Obesity prevention policies as situated caring

Drawing on Critical Policy Studies and feminist STS, this article conceptualizes obesity prevention activities as ongoing and precarious practices of relating – rather than as means for ‘getting results’ or vehicles through which normative discourses are instilled. It focuses on ‘community approaches’ within public health, whose aim is to stimulate healthy initiatives from what policy makers term ‘bottom-up’, emerging from the situations, concerns and abilities within neighbourhoods. Drawing on ethnographic research on the ‘Amsterdam Healthy Weight Programme’, I demonstrate that different practices of relating enact particular versions of health and community. I warn that reliance on statistics-based problem definitions, dietary advice and professional hierarchies preconfigures health promotion as a matter of ‘reaching out’ to particular ‘problem populations’ defined around class and ethnicity. I show, however, that community approaches may also foster spaces for ‘situated caring’, where health emerges in the negotiation of heterogeneous goods, including neighbourhood revival, togetherness and fun. Situated caring has effects that cannot be captured by obesity prevalence statistics. The study of health promotion policies as practices of relating highlights that policy is not a monolithic structure of plans and commitments but is continuously done and redone. The article, then, introduces a new evaluative field that critically articulates the diverse ways in which ideals such as engagement and health are enacted in practices.

Trade and Child Labour in SAARC Countries

A review of past studies shows that the studies confine their analysis of trade and child labour in the setting of the trading of homogeneous goods. Hence, the presence study aims to assess the relationship of trade and child labour in South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) countries by incorporating the role of selection of variety or product heterogeneity in child labour demand. In the context of trade in homogeneous and heterogeneous goods, the trade-induced effects are the selection, scale, and technique effects. The panel data analysis is employed to investigate the nexus between trade and child labour over the study period of 1999 to 2019. The results imply that the opening of trade alone will not reduce child labour if it is not accompanied by supportive measures, namely the trade-related effect of child labour, the effect of scale and technique. Therefore, this study suggests that trade liberalization through trade-induced effect would hamper the child labour presence in the emerging markets.

Macroeconomic concepts and analytical tools

The basic concepts of national income are explained, centered around the question of the measurement of the total output of heterogeneous goods in a capitalist economy, showing the effects of changes in the prices used to add up those goods. The capitalist economy consists of a private sector and a government sector. The balances between income and expenditure in these sectors are then linked to their supporting financial and non-financial balance sheets of assets and liabilities. The basic principles of stock-flow consistency between sectors of the economy are shown using sectoral balances.

ON THE SOLVING METHOD FOR SOME TRANSPORTATION PROBLEMS WITH HETEROGENEITIES

The article discusses the transportation problem for heterogeneous goods and heterogeneous vehicles. The proposed method allows to reduce the transportation problem with a heterogeneities to the classical transportation problem.