Observational study on the efficiency of Neonatal Emergency Transport in reducing mortality and morbidity indexes in Sicily

In these last 25 years, the Neonatal Emergency Transport (NET) service has been widely improved in Italy. To date, all National areas are covered by a NET service; 53 NET centers have been activated in all the Italian territory. Herein, the authors present an observational study to evaluate the rate of infantile mortality after introduction of NET in Sicily, and to study the efficiency of this service in reducing these rates of mortality in vulnerable neonates, transported from primary care birth centers to tertiary facilities to undergo to specialized NICU assistance. All neonates who required an emergency transport by NETS were included. No exclusions criteria were applied. Demographic and regional infantile mortality data, expressed as infant mortality rate, were selected by the official government database (ISTAT- National Statistic Institute—http://www.istat.it). All data were respectively divided into three groups: data concerning transport, clinical condition, and mortality of the transported patients. We transported by NET 325 neonates. The analysis of the infant mortality rate (per 1.000 live births) in Catania from 2016 to 2018 was reduced compared to the same rate calculated before NETS activation (4.41 index before 2016 vs 4.17 index after 2016). These data showed an increase in other provinces (Enna, Caltanissetta, and Agrigento). 61% of neonates showed a respiratory disease. During the study period the proportion of neonates with a Mortality Index for Neonatal Transportation—MINT < 6 has been reduced, while there was an increase of neonates with higher Transport Risk Index of Physiologic Stability-TRIPS score results. The slight decrease of infantile mortality in Catania during the first three years after introduction of NET follows the same trend of all Italian territories, showing the importance of this service in reducing infantile mortality.

TREND, DIRECTION AND PERFORMANCE OF AFGHANISTAN’S INTERNATIONAL TRADE

Afghanistan is at a strategic location which acts as an important corridor in Asia and connects powerful industrial economies such as India and China to Northern Asia and to Europe via dry and seaways and vice versa through the Lapis Lazuli Corridor, Chabahar port and other corridors. The study asses to perceive the performance and trend of Afghanistan’s export and import. Moreover, the study points out to the destinations of Afghanistan's exports by regions and origin of Afghanistan’s imports by regions. The paper descriptively concentrates on direction, trend, and performance of the Afghanistan trade. The data is retrieved from numerous secondary sources encompass National Statistic and Information Authority and Ministry of Trade and Industry of Afghanistan. The period selected is from 2002 to 2018. Moreover, the research is based on quantitative data and descriptive statistics have been used to analyze the trend and direction of the Afghanistan trade. The study shows that there is an ascending direction of Afghanistan's export to Emerging and Developing Asian Economies majorly includes Pakistan, India and Bangladesh, while it indicates a descending export direction to Advanced Economies, Commonwealth Independent States, Middle East, and European Nations. Furthermore, Afghanistan's import shared with the regions is in an unstable form. JEL Classification Codes: F1, F10, F19.

Prospects of the Chinese market for Russian agri-food exports

One of the major targets of modern agri-food policy in Russia is a significant increase of agri-food exports — almost twice as much by 2024. In this projection, China is viewed as the most promising market. However, Russia’s entrance to the Chinese market faces a number of constraints. In addition to the standard difficulties associated with Russia’s agricultural and food exports (export infrastructure constraints, expensive logistics, and import bans on certain Russian products), there are fundamental constraints on supply to China in the long-term. This paper formulates a long-term view of the prospects of, and risks associated with, introducing Russian agricultural products into the Chinese market. Methodically, the paper is based on an evaluation of competitive performance by the conventional method of measuring a country’s comparative trade advantages with the Balassa index. Also the authors use trade statistics of Comtrade, Russian and Chinese national statistic agencies, estimates of international analytical centers such as World Bank, USDA, OECD, McKinsey.

Data Reduction in Socio-Economic Studies

The article is devoted to the problem of data reduction as an important step on the way of providing reliability and efficiency of socio-economic studies. Through the reduction the large amounts of raw data, generated from different sources, become more useful, convenient and clear for use. Meanwhile, the data reduction is not treated as a separate phase of studies in the national statistic practice. The aim of the article is to substantiate the importance of data reduction in economic studies and attempt to systematize and generalize the essence and components of the phase of data reduction as well as ways of their implementation. The study is based on methods of theoretical generalization, abstract and logic, analogy and others. The essence of data reduction is defined as the process of converting raw data into the pure form and reducing the number of units’ attributes (features), which are not significant to further analysis. In fact, this is part of the analysis involving selection of the data that are most important from the viewpoint of the study’s goals. The significance of data reduction in economic studies is outlined. It is found that it assures the validity of their results, reduces their time and costs, simplifies the representational complexity of the problem being addressed, eliminates the errors and redundant data from the investigated set, looses the requirements to calculation tools. The data resulting from reduction are much more informative. Many dependencies and relationships become more readable (visual). It is emphasized that reduction applies to the current data (on-line), as well as to historical data (off-line), contained in the already created databases. The phases of data reduction are described. They are: control of data collection, data editing, classification, data construction and grouping, coding and transmission (data transmission to the processing tools - computers). Data reduction techniques and methods most common in the global practice are shown. Future studies of data reduction problems are expected to focus on potential ways to implement its advanced methods in the domestic practice of statistical science. It will allow for enhancing significantly the speed and efficiency of economic analysis and the reliability of its results.