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The increased participation of economies in regional and bilateral free trade agreements (FTAs) has resulted in welfare effects. This chapter attempts to determine the welfare implications of preferential reductions in tariffs and free-trade zones on Afghan imports by adopting the Magee (2016) framework. This approach separates the consequences of tariff hikes triggered by FTAs from the general equilibrium effects (GEEs) caused by unknown variables impacting the country's imports (historical links, shared language and culture, landlockedness, etc.). This method evaluates whether preferential tariff reductions favouring partner countries would benefit or harm member countries. The results indicate that the magnitude of the effects of trade creation (TC) is significantly higher than those of trade diversion. TC resulting from GEEs unexpectedly surpasses TC resulting from tariff preferences extended to member nations. Afghanistan's FTAs are not harmful but enhance living conditions. This chapter recognises South Asian Free Trade Area’s (SAFTA's) potential for trade expansion by focusing on commitment to regional integration and increasing liberalisation by implementing a more easily upgraded tariff framework and trade facilitation system. The findings are relevant since World Trade Organisation (WTO) members are often sceptical about regional trade agreements (RTAs) or Bilateral Free Trade Agreements (BFTAs) as agents harming well-being.

The significance of smart mobility practices in shaping cities from a smart perspective has grown in recent years, influencing policies and the choices made by inhabitants. This transformation has led to the emergence of novel services and strategies, creating a new, vibrant and highly personalised urban environment that caters to the needs and preferences of both local residents and visitors. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the influence of smart mobility practices on tourism flows in cities, considering the moderating effect of airport activities on this relationship.

Using a generalised method of moments estimation and focusing on 20 Italian cities over an eight-year period, the authors highlight the current relationship between smart mobility practices and tourism flows. Moreover, the authors demonstrate that the yearly advancement of airports positively moderates this relationship.

The findings indicate a significant relationship between smart mobility practices in modern cities and tourism inflows because they influence the development of tourism services and emerging trends such as smart tourism and smart destinations. Furthermore, airport activities as a proxy for city openness play a crucial role in this link. The study shows that airports have an incremental impact on tourism and on the relationship between tourism and sustainable practices.

The limitations of this quantitative approach include the focus on a single country, the challenge of measuring the development of smart mobility practices due to a lack of standardised variables and the need for future research to expand the sample to different countries in relation to tourism inflows.

This study has practical implications for policymakers and governance in their task of effectively coordinating internal smart mobility practices and managing incoming tourism flows.

This study has social implications, highlighting the need for policymakers and governance to address the societal impacts of smart mobility practices and tourism inflows, ensuring inclusive and sustainable outcomes for local communities.

This study contributes to the existing literature as one of the first attempts to examine the interplay between smart mobility practices in smart cities and tourism flows. Furthermore, it emphasises the role of airports in this relationship, highlighting how the interaction between these variables benefits both stakeholders.

Explores the attitudes of children in Malaysia’s competitive children’s market towards TV advertising, and how this affects their spending; children influence the market as immediate consumers, as influencers of their parents and other people, and as future adult consumers. Outlines the objectives and methodology of new quantitative research conducted into predictors of children’s attitudes, which also includes the effect of children’s attitudes on parents; the current research involved two primary schools in the Jitra town area, with a total of 252 children. Gives the background of child attitude research since Piaget, and explains the Rossiter scale. Identifies children’s preferences in products, themes and types of TV advertising. Finds that children’s awareness of advertising, and the influence on parents’ purchase decisions, are important predictors of child attitudes to advertising; the influence of TV advertising does impinge on consumer behaviour, whether of children or of their parents as a result of pestering, and younger children and children from lower social classes are especially susceptible to TV advertisements.

Intellectual disability (ID) is prevalent in 1 per cent of the population. Premenstrual syndrome (PMS) affects up to 5 per cent of the general population of adult women. Identification of PMS is challenging in women with ID due to differences in communication. Management of PMS in the ID population requires careful consideration of baseline function, co-existing mental and physical health problems, drug interactions as well as complex ethical considerations. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

Prospero-registered systematic review (CRD42019119398) of papers exploring the diagnosis and management of patients with PMS and ID (n=414). In total, 35 relevant titles were identified and 27 full text papers were assessed for eligibility, resulting in 10 studies for final qualitative analysis.

Ten original research papers were included. There are no standardised symptom criteria for diagnosis of PMS in women with ID. Studies relied on observer-reported data. All papers demonstrated higher rates of PMS in women with ID compared with the general adult population. Management was not standardised and varied between centres. Mainstays of treatment included non-steroidal anti-inflammatories, combined oral contraceptive pills and intramuscular progesterone. Newer evidence suggests levonorgestrel intrauterine systems may be appropriate. There was no quantitative method of establishing success of management.

A modified symptom diary should be used for diagnosis in this population. Differentiation between cyclical behavioural change due to pain vs mood disturbance remains challenging. Conservative, psychological and medical management should be the mainstay of treatment, with surgery considered in exceptional cases.

This paper demonstrates the current limited evidence for the management of PMS in women with a diagnosis of ID and offers an overview of the current options for managing these patients’ symptoms.

Effective construction safety training has been considered to play a significant role in reducing the incidence of accidents. However, the current safety training methods pay less attention to the relationship between workers' personalized characteristics and their learning needs, which results in workers' low learning participation and poor training effect. The purpose of this paper is to improve the participation and effect of safety training for construction workers with a persona-based approach.

This paper presents a persona-based approach to safety tag generation and training material recommendation. By extracting the demographic characteristics and behavior patterns tags of construction workers, a neural network algorithm is introduced to calculate the learning needs tags of workers, and the collaborative filtering recommendation method is integrated to enrich the innovation of recommendation results. Offline experiments and online experiments are designed to verify the rationality of the proposed method.

The results show that the learning needs of workers are closely related to their background. The proposed method can effectively improve workers' interest in materials and the training effect compared with conventional safety training methods. The research provides a theoretical and practical reference for promoting active safety management and achieving worker-centered safety management.

First, a persona-based approach is introduced to establish a novel framework for solving the problem of personalized construction safety management. Second, an artificial intelligence algorithm is used to automatically extract the learning needs tag values and design a hybrid recommendation method for construction workers' personalized safety training. The collaborative filtering method is integrated to enrich the innovation of recommendation results.

This study aims to investigate the machining performance of CVD-coated carbide tools by considering most crucial machinability aspects: cutting force, tool life, surface roughness and chip morphology in high-speed hard turning of AISI 4340 alloy steel under a sustainable minimum quantity lubrication (MQL) environment.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the performance of coated carbide tools under MQL environment therefore, machining tests were performed in accordance with the Taguchi L9 orthogonal array, accommodating the three crucial machining parameters such as cutting speed (V = 300–400 m/min), feed rate (F = 0.1–0.2 mm/rev) and depth of cut (DOC = 0.2–0.4 mm). The measured or calculated values obtained in each experimental run were validated for normality assumptions before drawing any statistical inferences. Taguchi signal-to-noise (S/N) ratio and analysis of variance methodologies were used to examine the effect of machining variables on the performance outcomes.

The quantitative analysis revealed that the depth of cut exerted the most significant influence on cutting force, with a contributing rate of 60.72%. Cutting speed was identified as the primary variable affecting the tool life, exhibiting a 47.58% contribution, while feed rate had the most dominating impact on surface roughness, with an overall contributing rate of 89.95%. The lowest cutting force (184.55 N) and the longest tool life (7.10 min) were achieved with low machining parameters at V = 300 m/min, F = 0.1 mm/rev, DOC = 0.2 mm. Conversely, the lowest surface roughness (496 nm) was achieved with high cutting speed, low feed rate and moderate depth of cut at V = 400 m/min, F = 0.1 mm/rev and DOC = 0.3 mm. Moreover, the microscopic examination of the chips revealed a serrated shape formation under all machining conditions. However, the degree of serration increased with an incremental raise with cutting speed and feed rate.

The study is limited to study the effect of machining parameters within the stated range of cutting speed, feed rate and depth of cut as well as other parameters.

Practitioners may consider to adopt this machining technique to create more sustainable working environment as well as eliminate the disposal cost of the used metal cutting fluid.

By applying this machining technique, diseases caused by metal cutting fluid to the mechanist will be significantly reduced, therefore creating better lifestyles.

Hard turning is commonly carried out with advanced cutting tools such as ceramics, cubic boron nitride and polycrystalline cubic boron nitride to attain exceptional surface finish. However, the high cost of these tools necessitates exploration of alternative approaches. Therefore, this study investigates the potential of using cost-effective, multilayer-coated carbide tools under MQL conditions to achieve comparable surface quality.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/ILT-01-2024-0013/

The purpose of this research is to provide a comprehensive review of key influential aspects and conceptual structure of Takaful literature.

The authors review 149 journal articles using bibliometric citation analysis, co-word analysis and citation histograms. However, the authors have introduced a new index of keywords for co-word analysis.

The results purpose four research clusters of Takaful literature. The first theme compared Takaful with conventional insurance from various perspectives. Second theme explored the business model and sharia-compliant issues. Third theme applied the marketing concepts and examined the customer behaviour such as commitment, loyalty, satisfaction or awareness. Fourth theme examined risk management, investment and corporate governance issues. This research also identified the structure of variables studied in each theme.

This paper follows a very novel and trending bibliometric approach and explores what has been published, encompassing all aspects of Takaful literature. This study also presents 22 future research directions which are either missing or less researched in Takaful literature.

The purpose of this study is to examine the escape motivations of the emerging market and provide suggestions for Australia’s promotion. This study adopts the push and pull framework to identify travel motivations of Emirati nationals to Australia.

This study uses a series of focus groups and in-depth interviews to understand the escape motivations that encourage Emiratis to leave their home country and travel to Australia for a holiday.

The results indicate that Emiratis are motivated to travel to Australia by three escape factors: physical, interpersonal and fun. The internal motivations that encourage Emiratis to escape their home country are inseparable from Australia’s external attributes that attract the Emiratis to the country.

The study contributes to the theory of tourist motivation by supporting it in the culturally different Muslim/Arab context, which has not been explored before. The authors argue that it is not so much what Australia offers and what escape needs the Emiratis can fulfil in Australia, but rather that Australia serves the Emiratis well and meets their escape needs.

The present study aims to examine and explain cultural heritage destination by applying multiple dimension image model (cognitive–affective–conative aspects).

A total of 233 international heritage-based tourists were surveyed on-site at some of the most prominent historical attractions in Malacca, one of the first cities in Malaysia declared as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The covariance-based structural equation modelling was applied to examine the hypotheses.

The structural equation modelling validated that cognitive image aspects such as living culture, intangible and tangible are affected positively. The effects are statistically significant for conative and affective images. On the other hand, cognitive tangible image is an aspect that impacted affective image to a lesser degree than conative image. Whereas affective image attributes were found to have significant and positive influence on conative image.

This study enriches the limited empirical research study on heritage image conceptualisation by expanding into tri-component model. The destination image has garnered a great deal of attention, particularly due to its significant and impactful influence on the decision-making and the sustainable behaviour of tourists, and it has since become the subject of many studies in the tourism and hospitality literatures. But most research concerning heritage image for destinations has considered the construct uni-dimensionally.