BACKGROUND The importance of tackling economic, social and health-related inequities is increasingly accepted as a core concern for the post-Millennium Development Goal framework. However, there is a global dearth of high-quality, policy-relevant and actionable data on inequities within populations, which means that development solutions seldom focus on the people who need them most. INTREC (IN...

BACKGROUND Almost seven years after the publication of the final report of the World Health Organization's Commission on Social Determinants of Health (CSDH), its third recommendation has not been attended to properly. Measuring health inequities (HI) within countries and globally, in order to develop and evaluate evidence-based policies and actions aimed at the social determinants of health (S...

Despite the major role of genome size for physiology, ecology, and evolution, there is still mixed evidence with regard to proximate and ultimate drivers. The main causes of large genome size are proliferation of noncoding elements and/or duplication events. The relative role and interplay between these proximate causes and the evolutionary patterns shaped by phylogeny, life history traits or e...

Although studies have revealed some of the factors behind Ghana’s fertility transition, much effort is still needed to explain the contribution to the transition of social factors such as beliefs, practices, customs, etc. Most of the studies have used macro-level data (mainly the Demographic and Health Surveys), and have therefore been unable to unravel in fine details the reasons at the micro ...

To study the biological and behavioral process of the recent drastic fertility decline in China, the authors reviewed relating factors (proximate determinants) and applied the Bongaarts model to the population of China for the years 1971 and 1981, during which the fertility rate dropped most rapidly and substantial population control policies were performed. By application of the model, the de...

—Sexual size dimorphism (SSD), where males and females differ in body size, is prevalent among animal species. In species where females are larger, size may provide a fecundity advantage, whereas in species where males are larger, size may lend an intrasexual competition advantage. In most rattlesnake species, adult males are heavier and longer than females. The predominant hypothesis for this ...

This study examines the determinants of outward foreign direct investment (FDI) from Latin American countries and compares it with their OECD counterparts. Our analysis is based on a sample 45 countries, 13 America 32 OECD, over period 2001–2012. We find that FDI more likely to be located in geographically proximate similar culture language than also show less resource seeking. presumably refle...

BACKGROUND It is thought that excessive alcohol consumption is related to the high mortality among working age men in Russia. Moreover it has been suggested that alcohol is a key proximate driver of the very sharp fluctuations in mortality seen in this group since the mid-1980s. Designing an individual-level study suitable to address the potential acute effects of alcohol consumption on mortali...

BACKGROUND Although natural resources play a central role in rural livelihoods across the globe, little research has explored the relationship between migration and natural capital use, particularly in combination with other livelihood capitals (i.e., human, social, financial and physical). OBJECTIVE Grounded in the rural livelihood framework, this paper explores the association between the l...