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The purpose of this paper is to appraise the sustainability of the Nigerian Army Shopping Arena urban renewal project in Oshodi‐Lagos, Nigeria.

Case study research design was adopted for the study and both quantitative and qualitative data collection methods were used. Data were collected from randomly selected 94 business operators in the shopping complex using structured questionnaires, while oral interviews were conducted with two purposively selected members of the project management team. Data were also collected through non‐participant observation and analysed by using both descriptive statistics and content analysis.

The project was executed using the build‐operate‐transfer (BOT) arrangement, and users were generally satisfied with facilities provided, except for the provision of utilities. Access to public facilities, creation of job opportunities, community involvement and sense of ownership, as well as the provision of facilities for pedestrian and vehicle users were considered as contributing optimally, while adherence to the principle of green design and construction was rated as contributing minimally to the sustainability of the project.

The adoption of BOT can facilitate access to funds for urban renewal projects in the developing countries. Creation of job opportunities, ensuring users' satisfaction, community involvement and compatibility with environment can promote the sustainability of urban renewal projects in the developing countries.

The study extents our understanding of funding mechanisms, users' satisfaction with, and the sustainability of urban renewal projects from the Nigerian perspective.

Although there exists a rich literature on fisheries traditional management systems in North and South America, Caribbean, Asia and Pacific islands, much less information is available on inland African fisheries. Presents the first regional‐scale survey of traditional management systems operated within the Lake Chad Basin. The survey focused on the status and organization of the local (de facto) management systems and their interactions with the modern (de jure) regulations. The results show that fishing activities within the whole Basin are still largely under the control of the traditional local authorities. The few open‐access fishing grounds are areas that traditional authorities have never controlled or water‐bodies that they have had to “give up” in recent times due to the presence of armed groups. These areas are also areas where illegal taxation systems operated by non‐legitimated governement agents have developed, essentially as a consequence of the remoteness and political instability of the whole Basin.

Lubricating oil leakage is a common issue in thermal power plant operation sites, requiring prompt equipment maintenance. The real-time detection of leakage occurrences could avoid disruptive consequences caused by the lack of timely maintenance. Currently, inspection operations are mostly carried out manually, resulting in time-consuming processes prone to health and safety hazards. To overcome such issues, this paper proposes a machine vision-based inspection system aimed at automating the oil leakage detection for improving the maintenance procedures.

The approach aims at developing a novel modular-structured automatic inspection system. The image acquisition module collects digital images along a predefined inspection path using a dual-light (i.e. ultraviolet and blue light) illumination system, deploying the fluorescence of the lubricating oil while suppressing unwanted background noise. The image processing module is designed to detect the oil leakage within the digital images minimizing detection errors. A case study is reported to validate the industrial suitability of the proposed inspection system.

On-site experimental results demonstrate the capabilities to complete the automatic inspection procedures of the tested industrial equipment by achieving an oil leakage detection accuracy up to 99.13%.

The proposed inspection system can be adopted in industrial context to detect lubricant leakage ensuring the equipment and the operators safety.

The proposed inspection system adopts a computer vision approach, which deploys the combination of two separate sources of light, to boost the detection capabilities, enabling the application for a variety of particularly hard-to-inspect industrial contexts.

The purpose of this paper is to study the level of importance existing among the indicators that were previously defined for a Performance Measurement Systems (PMS) and are relative to franchises in Brazil, using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) methodology, together with a series of tests, which are responsible by verifying the degree of reliability, robustness and stability of the parameters used and the results obtained. As a result, the author suggests that the diagnosing of the five delimited indicators have different relevance assigned to them.

This paper reviews extant literatures in Franchise, PMS, Multiple Criteria Decision Making (MCDM), in specific the theory about AHP.

The authors found that it was possible justified, for both the relative and the evaluative method, that the I3 was the main point of the system and, as a consequence, be considered as priority when talking about sectorial development of franchises in Brazil. As for the other indicators, even being located in a level lower than I3, they must be taken into contemplation in these measurements, however, with a relatively inferior importance degree.

It was possible to better comprehend which economics and non-economic factors selected have a more predominance in the Brazilian franchise context, according to characteristics of the companies present.

The absence of scientific papers that describe the relevance level of the main factors that influence in the Brazilian franchise system.

The purpose of the study is to examine the relationship between air pollution and life expectancy considering the roles of institutional quality, agricultural output, foreign direct investment (FDI) and other socio-economic variables in Nigeria from 1981Q1 to 2019Q4.

The study employed spliced quarterly data from annual series collected from the World Bank development indicators and Central Bank of Nigeria. The dynamic multivariate models were analysed using the vector error correction mechanism (VECM), variance decomposition and Granger causality techniques.

The VECM result indicated a statistically significant adverse effect of air pollution on life expectancy. However, institutional quality, gross domestic product per capita, agricultural output, government social expenditure and school enrolment rate ameliorate the adverse health effects of air pollution, while FDI had mixed effects on life expectancy at different significance levels and at varying lag lengths. The Granger causality result revealed a uni-directional causality from air pollution to life expectancy; bidirectional causal chain between agriculture, FDI, government social expenditure and life expectancy, while a uni-directional causal linkage run from life expectancy to income per head and from school enrolment to life expectancy respectively. However, there is no evidence of causation between institutional quality and life expectancy due to weak institutional quality, but foreign direct invest causes carbon emission in a uni-directional manner in line with pollution haven hypothesis.

The study's modelling is limited by not considering the resource curse variable in the model due to paucity of data. Nigeria is the biggest crude oil exporter in Africa and ranks 13th globally with daily output of about 2.4 m barrels. Thus, the negation of resource curse in air pollution–life expectancy nexus de-emphasises the effectiveness of rich resources on health and environment. Future studies could address this limitation by incorporating resource curse in environmental-health models for Nigeria.

It is imperative for the country to adopt stringent anti-air pollution strategies that would establish a balance between FDI attraction and agricultural expansion to the benefits of her citizens' longevity. Also, education should be considered as a strategic action to enhance life expectancy through expansion in the provision, accessibility and affordability to improved school enrolment rate. The choice of quarterly time series over annual data helped to establish the current relationship between air pollution and life expectancy using efficient estimators.

The study contributes to literature by disaggregating yearly series into quarterly series, which has implications for the efficiency of the estimates, unlike earlier studies which ignored this fundamental process. The result of this study produced reliable policy direction for improvement in life expectancy in an emerging economy since quarterly estimates are more robust and reliable for forecasting than its yearly counterpart. The outcome of the study extended the original tenets of the Grossman's health stock theory using the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) and pollution haven hypotheses (PHH).

The purpose of this paper is to assess the relative effectiveness of bilateral and multilateral concessional debts on economic growth in 32 sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries over the period 1985–2016.

The recently developed dynamic panel autoregressive distributed lag models which comprise three different estimators, the mean group, pooled mean group (PMG) estimator and dynamic fixed effect, were applied to estimate the model. Following these estimators, the Hausman test was employed to determine the efficient and consistent estimator.

The results showed that bilateral concessional debts had a negative impact on growth. From the findings, a 1 percent increase in bilateral concessional debts induced economic growth to decline by 38.1 percent points in the short run, and by 7.1 percent points in the long run; convergence to long-run equilibrium adjusted at the speed of 90 percent on an annual basis. Multilateral concessional debts were found to have a positive impact on growth both in the short and long run. The coefficient of the error term was negatively signed and indicates that deviations from the long-run equilibrium path were being corrected at the speed of 89.4 percent annually.

To the authors’ best knowledge, empirical studies that specifically seek to examine how bilateral and multilateral concessional debts impacted on growth are yet to attract the attention of researchers. As a result, this study will complement related extant growth studies, especially in the case of SSA.

Given the importance of spatial effects in improving the accuracy of hotel demand forecasting, this study aims to introduce price and online rating, two critical factors influencing hotel demand, as external variables into the model, and capture the spatial and temporal correlation of hotel demand within the region.

For high practical implications, the authors conduct the case study in Xiamen, China, where the hotel industry is prosperous. Based on the daily demand data of 118 hotels before and during the COVID-19 period (from January to June 2019 and from January to June 2021), the authors evaluate the prediction performance of the proposed innovative model, that is, a deep learning-based model, incorporating graph convolutional networks (GCN) and gated recurrent units.

The proposed model simultaneously predicts the daily demand of multiple hotels. It effectively captures the spatial-temporal characteristics of hotel demand. In addition, the features, price and online rating of competing hotels can further improve predictive performance. Meanwhile, the robustness of the model is verified by comparing the forecasting results for different periods (during and before the COVID-19 period).

From a long-term management perspective, long-term observation of market competitors’ rankings and price changes can facilitate timely adjustment of corresponding management measures, especially attention to extremely critical factors affecting forecast demand, such as price. While from a short-term operational perspective, short-term demand forecasting can greatly improve hotel operational efficiency, such as optimizing resource allocation and dynamically adjusting prices. The proposed model not only achieves short-term demand forecasting, but also greatly improves the forecasting accuracy by considering factors related to competitors in the same region.

The originalities of the study are as follows. First, this study represents a pioneering attempt to incorporate demand, price and online rating of other hotels into the forecasting model. Second, integrated deep learning models based on GCN and gated recurrent unit complement existing predictive models using historical data in a methodological sense.

The success of the efforts for green building depends largely on integrating such approaches with building design education. However, most of the existing studies on green building have focused on the technical issues, while its socio-cultural and educational aspects have been less examined. In order to alleviate the problem, this paper presents an international workshop that explores how green building design can be taught in a global teamwork project using a green building assessment system, Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) checklist as a framework and examples of vernacular architecture as precedents. The results of an empirical survey reveals a gap between students' general learning about green building in a developing and a developed country and suggests that a collaborative project experience may facilitate bridging the gap and exchanging technical and cultural information related to sustainability.

This study reinvestigates the short-run and long-run inflation-hedging attributes of residential property assets in the Nigerian property market, based on variations in property types and location.

Data used for this study comprised the holding period returns of three residential property types, namely bungalow, block of flats and detached house during 1999–2018. These were obtained from property practitioners in Lagos, Abuja and Port Harcourt, respectively. The inflation values obtained from the National Bureau of Statistics were split into actual, expected and unexpected components. Fama and Schwert’s (1977) ordered least square (OLS) regression was used to assess the short-term inflation hedging efficacy. Afterwards, the long-run link between residential property and inflation was examined using the Johansen and Juselius cointegration test.

The results showed that despite the variations in hedging behaviour across property types in the three locations, residential property assets significantly provided protection over actual, expected and unexpected inflation in the short run based on the OLS regression analysis. The result of the Johansen and Juselius cointegration test also established a long-term link between the residential property assets and actual inflation. However, mixed results were found on the link between residential property and expected and unexpected inflation, as some of the assets did not effectively hedge these inflation components in the long run.

The study implied that the differences in property types and geographic locations are crucial in establishing the short-run and long-run inflation-hedging attributes of residential property assets and should be factored into consideration.

The paper complements the existing body of knowledge on the inflation-hedging attributes of residential property in emerging markets by determining the effects of variation in house types and geographic differences on the analysis.

The crisis in the Niger Delta predates discovery of oil in large quantities at Oloibiri in 1956. Before independence in 1960, conflict in the region took the form of agitation for political representation and protection against marginalization by the dominant ethnic groups. However, this crisis took a new dimension in the early 1990s as oil became a major source of foreign exchange and the derivation formula was changed in favour of the federal government with negative consequences on the local people (the need to maintain constant flow of oil have resulted to gross violation of the local people's rights by the state and the oil multinationals) especially under the military regimes. The entrenchment of democracy in the late 1990s further escalated the tripartite conflict between the state, oil multinationals and host communities as the complex crisis drew global attention. The formation of Movement for the Survival of Ogoni People (MOSOP) and Ijaw Youth Council (IYC) in the 1990s to challenge the abuse of human rights over four decades was overwhelmed applauded by the local people of the region. More importantly, MOSOP was the first social movement in the region to have internationalized the plight of the local people while IYC took over from the period when MOSOP had some internal crises that undermined its struggle.

Equally the achievements of MOSOP and IYC have instigated the formation of other social movements in the Niger Delta as a whole. The pressure from these social movements might have accounted for sudden change of policies by the state and the major oil multinationals in the mid-1990s. However, the fundamental question is to what extent the social movements (MOSOP/IYC) and International civil society have been successful with the issue of human rights abuse in the region.