Attitudes of Omani early childhood preservice teachers toward bilingual early childhood education: Benefits,challenges, and solutions

Compared to earlier times, many Omani parents have become more enthusiastic about bilingual education for their young children. To fully understand and improve early bilingual education, it is critical to start with an inquiry into prospective practitioners' attitudes toward bilingualism in early education as they are the ones who will work in bilingual education programs. Therefore, this research investigated the attitudes of early childhood pre-service teachers in Oman, toward bilingual education during children's early years. The data were gathered using qualitative survey methods with a focus group and analyzed using thematic analysis. Hence, essential themes and sub-themes were extracted from the data and an exhaustive analysis of pre-service teachers' attitudes toward bilingual education in the early years was conducted. The findings revealed that participants tend to favor such programs. Although they believe there are a few challenges in the field, they reported possible solutions that are presented in this study. Implications are discussed and recommendations are made.     

Counterspace Operations and Nascent Space Powers

In twenty-first-century warfare, satellites have become indispensable for gaining dominance in battlespace. This highlights the need to protect space assets while countering the qualitative edge that space can provide to adversarial actions. Hence, “counterspace operations” continue to gain the attention of military planners and researchers around the globe. Although it is the major space powers that have developed requisite capability and are showing more concerns for space security, these concerns are global in nature. As such, there is a need to develop a framework that can be utilized by nascent space powers to ensure protection of their space assets. This research work is intended to draw the attention of policymakers, space-technology protagonists, and military personnel, particularly of nascent space powers, to these global concerns. It gives an overview of counterspace operations and explores the doctrinal view-point of major military space powers for safeguarding their own space programs and negating the advantage of space to the enemy. Based upon this, a step-by-step approach is proposed for nascent space powers for embodying of elements of counterspace operations to remain protected during peace, crisis, or war.     

Egypt's multiproduct agricultural technology and agricultural policy

Based on the hypothesis that Egyptian farmers maximise economic profits, the multiproduct translog profit function is used to estimate input demand and output supply functions for corn, rice, and cotton crops grown in Egypt's Nile delta. Elasticity estimates indicate a generally high degree of price responsiveness. The estimates are used to evaluate Egyptian agricultural policies concerning labour, mechanisation, and output prices. The results show that Egypt's agricultural policies of taxing output and subsidising certain inputs have hada substantial negative impact on agricultural productivity.     

Export Response to Technical Barriers to Trade: Firm-Level Evidence from Pakistan

This study empirically examines the responses of trade margins to a battery of technical barriers to trade (TBT) and explores the mechanism, drivers and speed of adjustment. It uses a highly-disaggregated transaction-level dataset of mango-exporting firms from Pakistan and exploits a quasi-natural experiment in the identification strategy. It finds that, following the application of TBT measures, exports increased along the intensive margins. The process of adjustment took around four years, and larger quantities as well as higher prices drive this effect. Moreover, firms shrink their client base in destination markets but ship large quantities to a few big retailers.     

Trends in Public Administration Research: A Content Analysis of Iranian Journal Articles (2004-2017)

This study aims to examine the trends of public administration research in Iran during 2004–2017. A total of 520 articles from three databases have been reviewed and analyzed using content analysis. Results are reported based on research themes, purposes, orientations, methods, and authorship. Comparisons are made across two time spans and by journal type. Findings indicate that the focus of public administration research has been on issues of public administration, Islam and public administration, administrative performance, and organizational behavior in the public sector. Observations reveal that recent Iranian research studies have more explanatory purposes and often apply qualitative methods. The study also concludes that the Iranian public administration research has advanced considerably over the past 14 years, but more efforts are needed to fill in the gap in such important areas as new public service, civic participation, globalization, policy making, sound governance, and policy implementation.     

Expert Consensus on Factors Reducing Policy Coherence in the Context of Iran: Delphi-AHP

A web of public policies needs to display coherence to achieve their superior goal-improving quality of people’s live. Policy coherence (PC) ideally means policies with no contradictory effects. This article addresses complex issue of PC bottlenecks in general and in Iran in particular. In the first stage, Delphi Technique is used to identify factors reducing PC. A panel of experts reached on consensus on factors that are categorized in nine groups. In the second stage, the experts determined relative weightings of identified factor based on analytic hierarchy process (AHP). This article is focused on the more important factors. These Findings may be useful for other developing countries and developed countries.     

ASEAN in a Globalizing World

In the early 1990s, ASEAN emerged from the Cold War as a confident regional organization. With the accession of Cambodia, it seemed to be fulfilling the aspirations of its founding fathers to expand membership to include all ten Southeast Asian countries. Since the Asian financial crisis of 1997, however, ASEAN's self-confidence has been dealt a severe blow and it faces unprecedented challenges to its current status and future prospects. In the following article, former Indonesian Foreign Minister Ali Alatas, examines the various issues facing ASEAN today, including the impact of the Asian crisis; the ramifications of socioeconomic and political crises in the affected ASEAN countries; the implications of the rapid and fundamental changes in the international and regional economic, political and security environment; and the enlargement of ASEAN membership. Despite questions over ASEAN's future role, Alatas asserts his belief in the continuing relevance of this regional forum to contribute to regional stability.