Fertility Mediating Factors in Sub-Saharan Africa （SSA）： Macro-Level Cross Sectional Perspectives

The aim of this paper is to investigate the mediating factors of fertility levels and trends in Sub-Saharan African CSSA） countries. The major sources of data of the study are the 2001 and 2002 UNDP （United Nations Development Program）, covering 42 SSA countries. The selected antecedent variables of fertility levels and trends include： GDP per capita; female adult literacy rate; infant mortality rate; contraceptive prevalence rate; breastfeeding; access to health services; undernutrition; and level of urbanization. The main analytical techniques of the study include simple central tendency descriptive statistics and advanced multiple regression models. The outputs of the correlation matrix and regression models are shown to influence the levels and trends of fertility positively or negatively, increasing or decreasing fertility levels among the countries. But, contraceptive prevalence level appears to be relatively powerful at 5% significance level, relatively more decline with the level of urbanization and positively related with poverty level, which cumulatively gives rise to 5.9 total fertility rate per woman. Accordingly, with declining mortality and high fertility level, the era of rapid population growth in SSA countries has not yet been over with all its implications on sustainable development.

Vertical Distribution of Fiscal Revenue and Its Effect on Balancing Economic Growth

Widening interregional disparity is an obstacle to China’s development and a serious latent threat to social stability. To alleviate conflicts that may arise from this disparity, the Chinese government established centrally-oriented vertical distribution of fiscal revenue following the 1994 tax-sharing reform. Through massive two-way funding flows, this vertical distribution has promoted the allocation of financial resources and equalization of fiscal capacity across regions. However, as an important institutional arrangement in decentralization, it has played a limited role in balancing interregional economic growth. This is mainly evident in the growth constraint on economically developed regions under large-scale revenue centralization. The effect of the vertical distribution of fiscal revenue clearly interacts with local reliance on non-tax revenue and the level of earmarked grant from the central government, with the former significantly weakening the anti-growth effect of excessive centralization of fiscal revenue and the latter markedly reducing the growth incentive of central government subsidies.View full textDownload full text

Unravelling COVID-19 waves in Rio de Janeiro city:Qualitative insights from nonlinear dynamic analysis

Since the COVID-19 pandemic was first reported in 2019,it has rapidly spread around the world.Many countries implemented several measures to try to control the virus spreading.The healthcare system and consequently the general quality of life population in the cities have all been significantly impacted by the Coronavirus pandemic.The different waves of contagious were responsible for the increase in the number of cases that,unfortunately,many times lead to death.In this paper,we aim to characterize the dynamics of the six waves of cases and deaths caused by COVID-19 in Rio de Janeiro city using techniques such as the Poincaréplot,approximate entropy,second-order difference plot,and central tendency measures.Our results reveal that by examining the structure and patterns of the time series,using a set of non-linear techniques we can gain a better understanding of the role of multiple waves of COVID-19,also,we can identify underlying dynamics of disease spreading and extract meaningful information about the dynamical behavior of epidemiological time series.Such findings can help to closely approximate the dynamics of virus spread and obtain a correlation between the different stages of the disease,allowing us to identify and categorize the stages due to different virus variants that are reflected in the time series.