Preterm birth in low-middle income Countries.

Preterm birth (PTB), remains a major cause of significant morbidity and mortality world-wide with about 12-15million preterm births occurring every year. Although the overall trend is decreasing, this is mainly in high-income countries (HIC). The rate remains high in low-and middle-income countries (LMIC) varying on average between 10 and 12% compared to 9% in HIC. The pathogenesis of PTB is complex and multifactorial. Attempts to reduce rates that have focused on PTB as a single condition have in general been unsuccessful. However, more recent attempts to phenotype PTB have resulted in targeted preventative approaches which are yielding better results. Prevention (primary or secondary) is the only approach that has been shown to make a difference to rates of PTB. These include identifying risk factors pre-pregnancy and during pregnancy and instituting appropriate measures to address these. In LMIC, although some approaches that have been shown to be effective in some HIC are adaptable, there is a need to involve stakeholders at all levels in utilizing evidence preferrably generated in LMIC to implement strategies that are likely to reduce the rate of PTB. In this review, we focus on prevention and how to involve policy makers in the process of applying evidence into policy that would reduce PTB in LMIC.

Income inequality and environmental degradation in Egypt: evidence from dynamic ARDL approach.

Over the past four decades, the Egyptian economy has suffered from both income inequality and environmental degradation. This dual problem raises the question about the nature of the relationship between inequality and the environment in a developing country like Egypt. In this regard, the study aims to examine the impact of income inequality on carbon emissions during the period 1975-2017. The analysis considers the ability of the political economy approach compared to the Keynesian trade-off approach to explain the inequality-environment relationship in Egypt. To do this, the novel dynamic autoregressive distributed lags approach is employed to capture the short-run and long-run relationships and to overcome the complications associated with the structure of the widely used autoregressive distributive lags model. The findings show that the relationship between inequality and CO2 emissions is not a trade-off. Rather, inequality leads to environmental deterioration in the long run, but there is no significant effect in the short run. In the long run, a 1% rise in the Gini coefficient increases CO2 emissions by 2.28%. These results support the political economy approach in explaining the inequality-environment nexus. Hence, the economic development policies adopted in Egypt during the past four decades have led to a negative impact on the environment. The study advises economic policy makers in Egypt to adopt income redistribution policies to reduce the severity of income inequality. Improving income distribution has a positive effect on the environment in Egypt.