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Taking world society theory as our point of departure, we examine the effect of world culture on contraceptive use rates around the world. World-cultural rhetoric frames contraception as a necessity for economic development, a human rights issue, and a women’s health matter. Using data on contraceptive use among married women for a sample of 159 countries over the period from 1970 to 2012, we find that linkages to all three sets of discourses are associated with increased use of modern contraceptive methods, over and above countries’ sociocultural and economic characteristics. Nevertheless, we also find that world society influences vary across major cultural zones, defined in terms of predominant religions and geographic regions. World cultural effects are strongest in Orthodox Christian, Hindu, non-Western Protestant, and sub-Saharan African countries. There is no effect in Western and East Asian countries, where contraceptive use is comparatively high, or in zones such as non-Western Catholic nations, where the unmet need for contraception is often greatest. Compared to development and women’s rights rhetoric, health-based frames appear to have the broadest and most effective reach across cultural divides. Overall, however, we find that world society processes tend to produce cross-cultural convergence in contraceptive use rates.

Brazil's profound regional social inequalities raise concerns about their impact on adult mortality and data quality. Although the quality of mortality data has improved in recent decades, substantial regional disparities in death registration and mortality rates persist. Our study examines the spatial and temporal trends in death record quality and adult mortality across Brazil's small regions from 1980 to 2010. It assesses whether adult mortality rates are converging or diverging and whether the vital registration system is progressively improving. Utilizing mortality data and census records, we adopt a two-step approach. First, we evaluate data quality and calculate adult mortality estimates across subnational microregions using death distribution methods and TOPALS regression. Second, we employ bivariate choropleth mapping to explore the relationship between adult mortality and socioeconomic factors, measured across 558 microregions and disaggregated by sex. Our findings highlight regional and temporal evolution of completeness of death count coverage. Results show that social inequality is a key factor driving regional disparities in adult mortality. Additionally, assessing and adjusting for the under-registration of death counts is crucial for understanding the spatial relationship between adult mortality and the distribution of socioeconomic inequality.

How do educational systems prepare workers for the labor market? Stratification research has often made a distinction between two ideal-types: “qualificational spaces,” exemplified by Germany with a focus on vocational education, and “organizational spaces,” exemplified by France with a focus on general education. However, most studies that investigated this distinction did so by focusing only on the size of the vocational sector, not on whether graduates with a vocational degree actually link strongly to the labor market. Moreover, they often studied male workers only, ignoring potential gender differences in how school-to-work linkages are established. In this paper, we map the change in education–occupation linkage in France and Germany between 1970 and 2010 using an approach that can distinguish between changes in rates and changes in the structure of school-to-work linkages. Surprisingly, we find that the German vocational system in 1970 was not, on average, substantially more efficient in allocating graduates to specific occupations than the French system. This finding is a major departure from earlier results, and it shows that the differences between 1970’s France and Germany, on which the qualificational-organizational distinction is based, are smaller than previously assumed. Partly, this is due to the fact that the female labor force was omitted from earlier analyses. We thus show that ignoring the female workforce has consequences for today’s conception of skill formation systems, particularly because a large share of educational expansion is caused by an increase in female enrollment in (higher) education.

Colombia is a megadiverse, multiethnic, and multicultural country with a tremendous socio-ecological systems (SESs) diversity, which faces essential challenges arising from human activities, low levels of sustainable economic development, poverty, and social inequality rates, and the persistence of multiple forms of military, political, and social violence. Understanding the resilience of this complex system is both fundamental and challenging due to the contradictory effects of economic development and regional ecosystem degradation. This research proposes the Socio-Ecological Resilience Integrated Index (SERII) to assess historical changes in socio-ecological resilience in Colombia’s departments (political-administrative units) between 1985–2022. The SERII considers the trade-offs between ecosystems, social systems, and production systems, providing a complete perspective of integrated management with a geographic resolution at the level of general political-administrative units. The results reveal a spatial variation in the SERII, with worse conditions in the Caribbean, the Pacific, and the Colombian Amazon (on the country periphery) and better conditions in departments of the country center. From 1985 to 2022, the SERII experienced a decrease (51.5%), driven by ecosystem degradation, increased extractive activities (illegal and illegal), and the persistence of military, political, and social violence. While the limitations of the proposed indicator are described, the SERII effectively replicates the overall resilience of Colombia’s departments to external shocks and allows for suggesting regional management priorities for the targeted promotion of sustainable development.

In recent decades, scholars of world cultural diffusion have begun to examine the structure of the world society itself, finding evidence of regionalization within the network of international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs). There is little research, however, on how the structure of world society shapes processes of transnational diffusion. In this paper, I propose that the regionalization of world society, measured through INGO membership composition, structures the transnational diffusion of cultural norms like LGBT associations. Analyzing an original, comprehensive dataset of 3,141 domestic, voluntary LGBT associations founded between 1979 and 2009, I find that countries embedded in anti-LGBT regions are more resistant to the diffusion of domestic LGBT associations. I further find that the negative effect of embeddedness in anti-LGBT regions on domestic LGBT association founding is weakened by dependence on Western foreign aid. The findings highlight the importance of examining the composition of INGOs as well as attending to the role of regional culture in studies of transnational diffusion.

How do national high-stakes exams affect educational expansion across the world? High-stakes exams are conventionally viewed as systems of exclusion that constrain enrollments. In this paper, we situate exams within a broader historical and institutional context and argue that the constraining effect of exams on educational enrollments is a recent phenomenon. Exam systems diffused globally at a time when schooling was a limited enterprise, linked to just a few occupational roles. The later emergence of more inclusive visions of education, culminating in the Education for All (EFA) movement, propelled rapid global educational expansion. In this context, national high-stakes exam systems institutionalize earlier logics of selective education and consequently blunt the impact of more recent expansionary norms. Using panel regression models and a newly constructed dataset of 142 countries from 1960 to 2010, we show that high-stakes exams are associated with lower enrollments. However, this association is strongest in recent years, and exams interact negatively with measures of international pro-educational norms and pressures on nation-states. These findings are consistent with our historical/institutional argument: Exams constrain enrollments in recent years, in part by rendering nations less responsive to global expansionary pressures.

The bibliometric analysis investigated the impact of publications on trends in the literature and bioenergy research using artificial intelligence (AI) from 1991 to 2021. In this study, 1721 publications were extracted from the Web of Science, and an analysis of the countries, authorship, institutions, journals, and keywords was visualised. In the recent decades, this field has entered an outbreak phase. India was the most productive country in this area, followed by China, Iran, and the US. It also noted several notable differences between trends and subjects in developed and developing countries. The former led this field at the initial stage and later attached importance to using AI for research feedstock and impact assessment. Developing countries encouraged the advancement of this area and emphasised the feedstock usage of phase treatment and process optimisation. In addition, a co-authorship and institutes study revealed that authors and institutes in distant regions rarely collaborated. The journal analysis shows strong links between Energy, Fuel, and Energy Conversion and Management. Machine learning is by far the most common application of artificial intelligence (AI) technology in bioenergy research, with 53% of the articles using it. In these AI-related publications, the keyword artificial neural network (ANN) appeared most frequently in the articles.

Recent change in the daily temperature variation (DTV) for March in East Asia is investigated. For this purpose, the effects of atmospheric circulation and global warming on the DTV in the region are analyzed using Japanese 55-year reanalysis data. Among the high-frequency variations in surface air temperature (SAT) during spring, the DTV in March showed a significant, increasing trend in East Asia during the four decades from 1979 to 2020. Composite analysis shows that the above-normal March DTV is associated with the anomalous anticyclonic circulation in the North Pacific and the anomalous cyclonic circulation over Russia. These atmospheric circulation anomalies lead to a greater meridional SAT gradient and tend to cause more mid-latitude pressure systems to pass over East Asia. Ultimately, the SAT in March becomes more variable due to enhanced thermal advection over East Asia. In addition, this pattern of circulation anomalies associated with a large March DTV includes features of a weak East Asian winter monsoon (EAWM) system. Meanwhile, regression analysis results using the EAWM and long-term global warming trend indices suggest that both the large-scale atmospheric circulation and global warming contribute significantly to the March DTV change in East Asia. In particular, heterogeneous warming rates and localized soil drying in East Asia during the study period likely explain the role of global warming on East Asian DTV in March.

Urbanization is a major driver of land-use change, with significant implications for sustainable development in rapidly growing cities. In this study, we assess the spatiotemporal patterns of urban expansion in Lucknow, India, from 1991 to 2021, using geospatial techniques and Landsat satellite imagery. The key objective is to analyze urban growth patterns, identify contributing factors, and evaluate the sustainability implications of these trends. Results reveal a nearly fivefold increase in built-up area, from 53.86 km2 in 1991 to 261.45 km2 in 2021. Edge development accounted for 55.99% of total urban expansion from 1991 to 2001, while ribbon development increased from 18.06% to 21.03% by 2021. Leapfrog development, considered unsustainable, rose from 12.35% in 1991 to 17.35% in 2021. Compared to previous studies, findings highlight the significant influence of transportation infrastructure and industrialization on urban sprawl, particularly in the northeastern and northwestern zones. This study contributes by offering a zone-wise analysis of growth patterns, which provides deeper insights into the dynamics of urban expansion. The findings are crucial for urban planners, as they suggest the need for more stringent zoning regulations and targeted infrastructure investments to manage future growth sustainably while minimising environmental impact.