Quinoa, kiwicha and cañihua are strategic Andean grains for Peru, yet whether Peru’s revealed comparative advantage in them has translated into export performance remains poorly documented. Using official MINCETUR/SUNAT and International Trade Centre data for 2015–2024 (ten annual observations), this study applies a deliberately descriptive, historical design based on compound annual growth rates (CAGR), historically delimited sub-periods, volatility measures, unit values and the revealed comparative advantage indices RCA and ARCA. Quinoa export volume grew at a CAGR of 2.96%, but growth slowed from 12.0% per year in 2015–2017 to 0.5% per year in 2017–2024, while its unit value fell by 28.3% and its export value remained below the 2015 level. Kiwicha and cañihua showed rising RCA (+40.2% and +70.0%) but very volatile exports (standard deviation of annual growth of 52.3 and 39.5 percentage points) and falling unit values. In all three grains, stable or rising revealed specialisation coexisted with declining export value, a pattern consistent with a ‘comparative advantage trap’. Single-site evidence from Puno on the blue water footprint is treated as exploratory. Comparative advantage alone has not secured export competitiveness; differentiation, market diversification and better data are needed.
Port expansion strengthens trade connectivity and economic growth, but its socio-ecological costs are often concentrated in fishing communities dependent on coastal space and locally embedded livelihoods. Existing research documents the impacts of port expansion but provides less explanation of why fishing communities exposed to the same broader development context follow different trajectories. Accordingly, this study asks why some fishing communities resist or adapt under the same broader port-development context while others experience heightened vulnerability and decline, using a qualitative comparative case study of five fishing communities around Laem Chabang Port, Thailand, based on 40 semi-structured interviews. The findings show that exposure alone does not explain community outcomes. Divergence reflects how social disruption interacts with the configuration and mobilisation of bonding, bridging, and linking social capital and with governance responsiveness. Strong internal cohesion supported adaptation when connected to durable external relationships and comparatively responsive governance, whereas relational capacity remained limited where institutional access, participation, or substantive responsiveness was weak. These configurations produced five trajectories: organised adaptation, capped resilience, managed decline, underpowered adaptation, and operational vulnerability. Socially sustainable port development therefore requires attention to relational capacity, institutional access, and meaningful participation alongside physical exposure.
Electroluminescence (EL) imaging reveals internal defects in photovoltaic (PV) cells, but supervised inspection depends on costly defect annotation. This study presents a structure-aware anomaly detector built on a frozen DINOv2 ViT-S/14 backbone. A global branch scores whole-image deviation from normal training images. A local branch stores eight prototypes of normal appearance for each patch position of the cell and yields a patch anomaly map. Reference memories are fitted on defect-free images only; labeled anomaly validation images are used for model selection and threshold tuning, and bounding boxes are used only for evaluation. On a content-deduplicated PVEL-AD test set of 5143 images, the fused detector reached an AUROC of 0.8876 and an average precision (AP) of 0.9253 with 27.7 MiB of reference memory. Adapted PaDiM and PatchCore baselines, evaluated on the same partitions but with different backbones and input sizes, reached AUROCs of 0.7959 and 0.7907. Box-derived localization gave a Pointing Game hit rate of 0.6404 and a top-1% patch hit rate of 0.9122. Transferring the PVEL-AD calibration unchanged to the ELPV dataset failed: all calibrated scores saturated (AUROC 0.5000), and post-hoc raw scores ranked only weakly and differently for each cell type. Calibration transfer and domain sensitivity therefore remain open problems. The results support frozen foundation-model features as a compact option for PV EL inspection; energy, cost, and field benefits were not measured.
As universities assume increasingly important roles in responding to climate change and advancing sustainable development, little is known about how sustainability is integrated across rapidly expanding higher education systems in underrepresented regions such as Central Asia. This study examines sustainability development across 40 public, private and international universities in Uzbekistan using a sequential qualitative design combining comparative institutional analysis with 26 stakeholder interviews. The cases were not assigned to mutually exclusive maturity stages: all displayed mixed profiles across seven institutional dimensions, while five dominant pathways—mission-, technology-, governance-, discipline- and project-driven—captured their principal orientations. The analysis further identified four recurring organisational concerns concerning leadership, project dependency, measurement and stakeholder partnership. Building on these findings, the study proposes the five-stage Sustainability Maturity (SMat-EMIIT) Framework as a multidimensional diagnostic rather than a ranking instrument. For university administrators, it supports dimension-by-dimension diagnosis and priority setting; for policymakers, it helps target support without imposing a single institutional model. The framework offers propositions for further validation across rapidly reforming higher education systems within and beyond Central Asia.
This study assesses carbon-emissions disclosure quality (CDQ) and its drivers among Egyptian-listed firms. Using longitudinal content analysis, we examine EGX100 companies from 2020 to 2024, comprising an unbalanced panel of 442 firm-year observations and 112 unique firms. A 15-item Carbon Disclosure Quality Index (CDQI), covering Transparency, Comparability, and Reliability, is scored on a 0–2 rubric based on GRI 305, TCFD/IFRS S2, and SASB guidance. Intercoder reliability reached κ = 0.86. We test determinants of CDQI using pooled OLS with year fixed effects, firm-level controls, and firm-clustered standard errors. The findings show a clear upward trajectory in CDQI through 2024, while overall disclosure quality remains weak to moderate. Transparency recorded the greatest improvement, while Comparability remained the weakest dimension and Reliability continued to be constrained by limited assurance and methodological disclosure. Petrochemicals, Energy, Cement, and Basic Materials achieved the highest 2024 scores. Regression results indicate that environmental sensitivity, internationalization, dual listing, firm size, and later reporting years are positively associated with CDQI. The study provides evidence on multidimensional disclosure quality in an emerging market and proposes a practical roadmap for standardization, data governance, sector-specific reporting, and phased external assurance.
