BACKGROUND Prolonged labour causes maternal and perinatal morbidity and mortality. Its sequela include obstructed labour, uterine rupture, maternal exhaustion, postpartum haemorrhage, puerperal sepsis, obstetric fistula, stillbirths, birth asphyxia and neonatal sepsis. These complications can be reduced by using the partograph to assess the progress of labour. The Ministry of Health, Kenya has ...

To the Editor: Critical care is an expensive and labour-intensive undertaking, and it is well recognised that there is a global shortage of intensive care unit (ICU) beds.1 Although there are no recent published data regarding the cost of ICU care, total costs were estimated to exceed R2 000 per patient per day in 1991.2 Despite the cost, it is widely accepted that patients refused ICU admissio...

On the one hand, the Stolper-Samuelson (SS) corollary of the Heckscher-Ohlin theorem predicts that both trade and FDI should take advantage of the abundance of low-skilled labour in DCs and so imply an increasing demand for domestic low skilled labour and hence decreasing within-country wage dispersion and income inequality (Wood, 1994 and 1997; for a critical view, see Milanovic, 2002). On the...

In Tanzania maternal and perinatal mortalities and morbidities are problems of public health importance, and have been linked to the shortage of skilled staff. We quantified the available workforce and the required nursing staff for perinatal care in 16 health institutions in Dar es Salaam. WHO safe motherhood needs assessment instruments were used to assess the availability of human resources,...

Construction industry is considered as labour intensive, having shortage of skilled labour, unsafe with large number of industrial accidents. Construction industry requires high technology automation products (Robots) for improving productivity, safety, quality etc. Robots are developed by various countries in different areas like demolition, earthwork, bridge, tunnels, road work, underwater wo...

The implementation of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) in India in 2006, has voiced concerns about the possible adverse impact on agriculture due to a shortage of casual labour in the agriculture sector and an unfavourable shift in cropping patterns. At the same time, MGNREGA is also associated with investments in rural infrastructure. The scheme especially f...

"In order to provide an insight into the possible problems that face Saudi Arabia in its Fourth Five-Year Plan (1985-1990), this paper assesses several aspects of the manpower problems encountered in the Third Five-Year Plan (1980-1985). In general, it appears that the country's abundance of fixed capital, or at least the means to acquire it, only emphasizes the scarcity of other resources in ...

The literature has identified the quality of political institutions in the transition region as an essential but understudied component of growth, transition and reform. This paper aims to disentangle the determinants of democratic institutions by investigating if high income inequality is always detrimental to the emergence and stability of such regimes, and under what circumstances labour sca...

Background China’s rise as a “world factory” since the late 1970s has been attributed to the strategic coupling of local assets, particularly low–cost labour in the coastal regions, viz. Pearl River Delta (PRD) and Yangtze River Delta (YRD) in the Global Production Networks (GPNs) driven by transnational corporations (TNCs)’s cross-border investment. Since 2000, these export-led regions have en...