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Children who migrated without their families were noteworthy participants of interwar European migration history. 'Milk Sauce and Paprika' tells the story of Hungarian children who were sent to Belgium in the framework of a humanitarian project between 1923 and 1927. Based on a wide variety of sources such as official documents, contemporary newspapers, photographs, family correspondences, biographies and interviews, this book examines the history of the Belgian-Hungarian child relief project and describes its social and cultural impacts on the families involved in both countries. This compelling story of one of the first mass European child migration movements offers new insights in the dynamics of national and religious communities. Furthermore, it sheds light on intimate family life and contemporary habits and values regarding parenting and co-parenting in the interwar period. Cutting across national and cultural borders, this monograph connects individual and collective memory with the experiences of childhood and migration.

COVID-19 took a heavy toll on older adults. In Belgium, by the end of August, 93% of deaths due to COVID-19 were aged 65 or older. Similar trends were observed in other countries. As a consequence, older adults were identified as a group at risk, and strict governmental restrictions were imposed on them. This has caused concerns about their mental health. Using an online survey, this study established the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on adults aged 65 years or older, and which factors moderate this impact. Participants reported a significant decrease in activity level, sleep quality and wellbeing during the COVID-19 pandemic. Depression was strongly related to reported declines in activity level, sleep quality, wellbeing and cognitive functioning. Our study shows that the COVID-19 pandemic had a severe impact on the mental health of older adults. This implies that this group at risk requires attention of governments and healthcare.

This paper documents the pervasiveness of job polarization in 16 Western European countries over the period 1993-2010. It then develops and estimates a framework to explain job polarization using routine-biased technological change and offshoring. This model can explain much of both total job polarization and the split into within-industry and between-industry components.

Large exporters are simultaneously large importers. We show that this pattern is key to understanding low aggregate exchange rate pass-through as well as the variation in pass-through across exporters. We develop a theoretical framework with variable markups and imported inputs, which predicts that firms with high import shares and high market shares have low exchange rate pass-through. We test and quantify the theoretical mechanism using Belgian firm-product-level data on imports and exports. Small nonimporting firms have nearly complete pass-through, while large import-intensive exporters have pass-through around 50 percent, with the marginal cost and markup channels contributing roughly equally.

The COVID-19 pandemic has shown how a newly emergent communicable disease can lay considerable burden on public health. To avoid system collapse, governments have resorted to several social distancing measures. In Belgium, this included a lockdown and a following period of phased re-opening. A representative sample of Belgian adults was asked about their contact behaviour from mid-April to the beginning of August, during different stages of the intervention measures in Belgium. Use of personal protection equipment (face masks) and compliance to hygienic measures was also reported. We estimated the expected reproduction number computing the ratio of R 0 with respect to pre-pandemic data. During the first two waves (the first month) of the survey, the reduction in the average number of contacts was around 80% and was quite consistent across all age-classes. The average number of contacts increased over time, particularly for the younger age classes, still remaining significantly lower than pre-pandemic values. From the end of May to the end of July , the estimated reproduction number has a median value larger than one, although with a wide dispersion. Estimated R 0 fell below one again at the beginning of August. We have shown how a rapidly deployed survey can measure compliance to social distancing and assess its impact on COVID-19 spread. Monitoring the effectiveness of social distancing recommendations is of paramount importance to avoid further waves of COVID-19.

Our understanding of the earliest stages of crown bird evolution is hindered by an exceedingly sparse avian fossil record from the Mesozoic era. The most ancient phylogenetic divergences among crown birds are known to have occurred in the Cretaceous period 1 – 3 , but stem-lineage representatives of the deepest subclades of crown birds—Palaeognathae (ostriches and kin), Galloanserae (landfowl and waterfowl) and Neoaves (all other extant birds)—are unknown from the Mesozoic era. As a result, key questions related to the ecology 4 , 5 , biogeography 3 , 6 , 7 and divergence times 1 , 8 – 10 of ancestral crown birds remain unanswered. Here we report a new Mesozoic fossil that occupies a position close to the last common ancestor of Galloanserae and fills a key phylogenetic gap in the early evolutionary history of crown birds 10 , 11 . Asteriornis maastrichtensis , gen. et sp. nov., from the Maastrichtian age of Belgium (66.8–66.7 million years ago), is represented by a nearly complete, three-dimensionally preserved skull and associated postcranial elements. The fossil represents one of the only well-supported crown birds from the Mesozoic era 12 , and is the first Mesozoic crown bird with well-represented cranial remains. Asteriornis maastrichtensis exhibits a previously undocumented combination of galliform (landfowl)-like and anseriform (waterfowl)-like features, and its presence alongside a previously reported Ichthyornis -like taxon from the same locality 13 provides direct evidence of the co-occurrence of crown birds and avialan stem birds. Its occurrence in the Northern Hemisphere challenges biogeographical hypotheses of a Gondwanan origin of crown birds 3 , and its relatively small size and possible littoral ecology may corroborate proposed ecological filters 4 , 5 , 9 that influenced the persistence of crown birds through the end-Cretaceous mass extinction. A newly discovered fossil from the Cretaceous of Belgium is the oldest modern bird ever found, showing a unique combination of features and suggesting attributes shared by avian survivors of the end-Cretaceous extinction.

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2), a novel evolutionary divergent RNA virus, is responsible for the present devastating COVID-19 pandemic. To explore the genomic signatures, we comprehensively analyzed 2,492 complete and/or near-complete genome sequences of SARS-CoV-2 strains reported from across the globe to the GISAID database up to 30 March 2020. Genome-wide annotations revealed 1,516 nucleotide-level variations at different positions throughout the entire genome of SARS-CoV-2. Moreover, nucleotide (nt) deletion analysis found twelve deletion sites throughout the genome other than previously reported deletions at coding sequence of the ORF8 (open reading frame), spike, and ORF7a proteins, specifically in polyprotein ORF1ab (n = 9), ORF10 (n = 1), and 3´-UTR (n = 2). Evidence from the systematic gene-level mutational and protein profile analyses revealed a large number of amino acid (aa) substitutions (n = 744), demonstrating the viral proteins heterogeneous. Notably, residues of receptor-binding domain (RBD) showing crucial interactions with angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) and cross-reacting neutralizing antibody were found to be conserved among the analyzed virus strains, except for replacement of lysine with arginine at 378th position of the cryptic epitope of a Shanghai isolate, hCoV-19/Shanghai/SH0007/2020 (EPI_ISL_416320). Furthermore, our results of the preliminary epidemiological data on SARS-CoV-2 infections revealed that frequency of aa mutations were relatively higher in the SARS-CoV-2 genome sequences of Europe (43.07%) followed by Asia (38.09%), and North America (29.64%) while case fatality rates remained higher in the European temperate countries, such as Italy, Spain, Netherlands, France, England and Belgium. Thus, the present method of genome annotation employed at this early pandemic stage could be a promising tool for monitoring and tracking the continuously evolving pandemic situation, the associated genetic variants, and their implications for the development of effective control and prophylaxis strategies.

Policy proposals promoting vocational education focus on the school-to-work transition. But with technological change, gains in youth employment may be offset by less adaptability and diminished employment later in life. To test for this tradeoff, we employ a difference-in-differences approach that compares employment rates across different ages for people with general and vocational education. Using microdata for 11 countries from IALS, we find strong and robust support for such a tradeoff, especially in countries emphasizing apprenticeship programs. German Microcensus data and Austrian administrative data confirm the results for within-occupational-group analysis and for exogenous variation from plant closures, respectively.

The understanding of the interaction between disease dynamics and human behavior is an important and essential point to control infectious. Disease outbreak can be influenced by social distancing and vaccination. In this study, we introduce two compartmental models to derive the epidemic curve and analyze the individual’s behavior in spreading and controlling the COVID-19 epidemic. The first model includes Susceptible, Exposed, Infectious, Hospitalized, Recovered and Death compartments and in the second model, we added a new compartment namely, semi-susceptible individuals that are assumed to be more immune than the susceptible. A comparison of the two models shows that the second model provides a better fit to the daily infected cases from Egypt, Belgium, Japan, Nigeria, Italy, and Germany released by WHO. Finally, we added a vaccinated term to the model to predict how vaccination could control the epidemic. The model was applied on the record data from WHO.

Over the past decades research on travel mode choice has evolved from work that is informed by utility theory, examining the effects of objective determinants, to studies incorporating more subjective variables such as habits and attitudes. Recently, the way people perceive their travel has been analyzed with transportation-oriented scales of subjective well-being, and particularly the satisfaction with travel scale. However, studies analyzing the link between travel mode choice (i.e., decision utility) and travel satisfaction (i.e., experienced utility) are limited. In this paper we will focus on the relation between mode choice and travel satisfaction for leisure trips (with travel-related attitudes and the built environment as explanatory variables) of study participants in urban and suburban neighborhoods in the city of Ghent, Belgium. It is shown that the built environment and travel-related attitudes—both important explanatory variables of travel mode choice—and mode choice itself affect travel satisfaction. Public transit users perceive their travel most negatively, while active travel results in the highest levels of travel satisfaction. Surprisingly, suburban dwellers perceive their travel more positively than urban dwellers, for all travel modes.