— This paper explores tariff reform in Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda between the early 1990s and early 2000s. Tariffs were reformed in an across the board manner consistent with implementing World Bank programs: the average tariff was reduced and the dispersion of tariffs was compressed, with the highest tariffs being eliminated. There is limited evidence of political economy influences ...

The term “Eastern Europe” defined in a number of manners and depends on perspective and personal definition. There exists conflicting views over which countries are listed under Central Europe and which are in Eastern Europe. For example, the United Nations clearly defined Eastern Europe that includes following countries: Belarus, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Moldova, Romania, Rus...

From the perspective of local livelihoods this paper explores the complex interactions between wildlife, livestock and people, and options for integrated wildlife and livestock management in the semi-arid rangelands of eastern Africa. The paper draws on the sustainable livelihoods approach which explicitly considers whether households have access to the assets required to engage in an activity,...

Conspiracy theories are ubiquitous when it comes to explaining political events and societal phenomena. Individuals differ not only in the degree to which they believe in specific conspiracy theories, but also in their general susceptibility to explanations based on such theories, that is, their conspiracy mentality. We present the Conspiracy Mentality Questionnaire (CMQ), an instrument designe...

Josh Slater looks back at the past 125 years of developments in equine infectious disease, including landmark discoveries in microbiology and genomics, and considers what the future may hold.

The paper reviews existing chronic heart failure (CHF) registers, a number of randomized trials, and meta-analyses on CHF. It provides a rationale for the need to create a CHF register in the Russian Federation, which will be able to assess the physician adherence to the guidelines for the guidelines for and the quality of medical care.

Although some plant traits have been linked to invasion success, the possible effects of regional factors, such as diversity, habitat suitability, and human activity are not well understood. Each of these mechanisms predicts a different pattern of distribution at the regional scale. Thus, where climate and soils are similar, predictions based on regional hypotheses for invasion success can be t...

Here we report a description of putative tool use in wild mountain gorillas. At the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund's Karisoke Research Center in Volcanoes National Park (Rwanda), an adult female was observed using a bamboo culm as a ladder for her offspring. This is one of only a few documented cases of possible tool use in wild gorillas, although tool use behavior is commonly observed in captive gor...

Breakfast is often considered the most important meal of the day and children and adolescents can benefit from breakfast consumption in several ways. The purpose of the present study was to describe trends in daily breakfast consumption (DBC) among adolescents across 31 countries participating in the HBSC survey between 2002 to 2010 and to identify socio-demographic (gender, family affluence an...