This study examines the determinants of Cambodia's economic growth using quarterly data for 2000–2024 within an autoregressive distributed lag–error correction model (ARDL–ECM) framework, incorporating key structural and macroeconomic determinants and a COVID-19 shock control. The ARDL bounds test supports a long-run cointegrating relationship, while the negative and significant error-correction term indicates adjustment toward equilibrium. The baseline results identify physical capital and labor-force participation as positive long-run correlates of growth, whereas inflation and informal employment are negatively associated with growth. The effects of technological progress, human capital, trade openness, and institutional quality are more sensitive in magnitude, significance, or sign and therefore warrant cautious interpretation. Because several annual variables were temporally disaggregated to quarterly frequency, their estimated short-run effects are interpreted as exploratory rather than as precise quarterly policy effects. Robustness analyses generally support the long-run dynamic relationship, although some coefficient-level sensitivity remains. Overall, the observed associations are consistent with the importance of productive investment, labor utilization, macroeconomic stability, economic formalization, and complementary improvements in human capital, technological capability, and institutional effectiveness for Cambodia's long-term development.
Background High-frequency social media use has been associated with the normalization of sexual activity and earlier initiation through exposure to peer-generated content. Most prior studies rely on coarse screen time measures that conflate passive consumption with compulsive social media engagement, limiting inference about frequency-specific risk. Methods We analyzed restricted-use 2023 National Youth Risk Behavior Survey data, which introduced the first granular measure of social media use frequency and used Linear Probability Models. Results Checking social media more than once per hour was associated with a 9.4 percentage point higher probability of ever having sex (p < 0.01). Associations with sex before age 13, sex before age 16, and having multiple partners were statistically insignificant. Implications School health counselors and educators working with high school students are well positioned to incorporate social media literacy into existing sexual health curricula. Conclusions These findings offer nationally representative evidence relevant to ongoing legislative debates over engagement-maximizing platform design features targeting adolescents and to platform content policies addressing sexual normalization content reaching adolescent audiences. While the findings suggest potential policy relevance, they reflect associations rather than causal effects; further research, including longitudinal studies and other designs suited to causal inference, is needed to confirm these relationships and inform interventions.
The rapid growth of digital markets has created new forms of consumer harm that traditional legal frameworks struggle to address. Indonesian business law, rooted in the consumer welfare paradigm of neoclassical economics, continues to rely on price-based and efficiency-oriented metrics. These metrics are poorly suited to capture non-price harms arising from data extraction, algorithmic governance, and behavioural manipulation. This study examines the theoretical adequacy of the welfare-based approach and proposes consumer autonomy as a complementary normative benchmark that operates alongside, rather than in place of, consumer welfare. Using a normative doctrinal analysis supported by illustrative references to the European Union's Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act, the study interprets and critically assesses key Indonesian statutes—including Law No. 5 of 1999 on Competition and Law No. 8 of 1999 on Consumer Protection and Law No. 27 of 2022 on Personal Data Protection—against an analytical framework of three autonomy dimensions, each with doctrinal indicators and evaluative criteria. The analysis reveals a structural misalignment between existing legal frameworks and digital market realities, particularly in their failure to address autonomy-related vulnerabilities, and distinguishes regulatory gaps, overlaps, normative conflicts, and coordination failures across the three regimes. The study argues that consumer autonomy—understood as informational self-determination, decisional integrity, and protection against structural manipulation—provides a necessary complementary normative foundation for digital market regulation and the basis for coordination between the relevant legal regimes. It further argues that the traditional separation between competition law and consumer protection law should give way to a coordinated, convergent approach that also integrates data protection law and is consistent with the emerging concepts of digital fairness and contestability. A principled doctrinal recalibration, rather than radical reform, is necessary to bring Indonesian business law into step with the digital economy while preserving its core commitments to fairness and competition. Because the study is doctrinal, these conclusions concern the coherence and reach of legal norms rather than the empirical magnitude of consumer harm.
This study examines how tourism policy implementation shapes employment access and cultural sustainability within the Parmalim Indigenous Community in Lake Toba, Indonesia, a nationally prioritized tourism destination. While tourism policy discourse emphasizes inclusive growth and community empowerment, limited research has explored how minority indigenous religious communities experience these initiatives in practice. Employing a qualitative exploratory case study design, this research draws on semi-structured interviews, and document analysis. The findings reveal a gap between policy objectives and implementation outcomes. Tourism expansion has generated uneven employment opportunities, with formal and capital-intensive sectors largely benefiting external actors, while Parmalim community members remain concentrated in informal and peripheral roles. At the same time, the community sustains its cultural identity through the deliberate non-commodification of sacred rituals, exercising authority over how and when cultural practices are shared. This strategy preserves spiritual integrity but limits formal recognition within tourism governance frameworks. By linking tourism policy implementation with indigenous cultural authority, this study demonstrates how selective inclusion can produce interconnected patterns of economic inequality and cultural marginalization. The findings contribute to debates on governance, empowerment, and culturally sensitive tourism development in multicultural contexts.
As the world moves towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals by the end of 2030, it faces numerous challenges, including transparency, traceability, accountability, and efficient resource management. At this moment, blockchain has come into the limelight as a means to address these challenges, resulting in a significant surge in research. So current research aims to uncover the trends in BT and provide future insights. The authors performed a bibliometric analysis covering literature from 2017 to 2026. After careful filtering, metadata for 88271 documents (covering 79.1% out of 111564 documents) were extracted from the Scopus database and analysed using RStudio, VOSviewer, and Excel. The results showed a significant rise in blockchain research and a continuous decline in citations due to the cumulative nature of citations. Moreover, this study finds that both journal articles and conference papers dominate, accounting for 83.6% of the literature, while journal reviews, books, and conference reviews account for 16.4%. Current research also indicates that blockchain-based research has shifted from a technological perspective towards an intelligent, integrated, and user-centric ecosystem. Based on this research, future studies should focus more on theoretical and conceptual work in the blockchain field, given its significant attention from researchers. Additionally, future researchers should examine how blockchain's decentralised and secure structure, together with AI, IoT, and smart contracts, can support real-time information management and decision-making in health care, supply chains, energy, and smart cities.
