Rasheda Khanam

• PhD
• Professor at University of Southern Queensland

Purpose The severity of depression among young Australians cannot be overstated, as it continues to have a profound impact on their mental health and general wellbeing. This study used machine learning (ML) algorithms to analyse longitudinal data, identifying key features to predict depression, assess future risk, and explore age-specific behaviour...

Abstract Purpose Since the COVID-19 pandemic had a significant impact on all facets of civilisation around the world, including food safety, this study aimed to determine and compare the pre-COVID and post-COVID food safety knowledge of Bangladeshi consumers and their association with sociodemographic variables. Design/methodology/approach The cur...

Background Understanding the association between socioeconomic inequalities and health behaviors is imperative for elucidating and effectively addressing health inequities among children and adolescents. Despite the wealth of literature on social gradients in health behaviors, longitudinal analyses of socioeconomic inequalities in the health behavi...

The aim of this study is to investigate the impact of the demographic factors on accessing finance of Libya’sSMEs. The results reported here are based on 557 survey questionnaires about the SMEs in different sectors inLibya. Our results confirm that demographic factors consisted of age, size, and sector have positive andsignificant impact on the ac...

This study investigates the impact of financial performance of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) on access to finance in Libya. The study is based on the primary data of 557 survey questionnaires on SMEs in various sectors of different regions of Libya. The data analysis contains the computation of descriptive statistics, correlation statis...

Background Breast cancer is a major global health concern, with substantial mortality and incidence rates. This study aims to assess the impact of these MBS policy changes on breast cancer screening services in Australia. Methods An interrupted time series (ITS) analysis, incorporating segmented regression and Autoregressive Integrated Moving Avera...

Background Mental health care is a major component of the services offered in Australia. Rapid adaptations in healthcare delivery occurred worldwide, with telehealth emerging as a pivotal solution due to the impact of COVID-19 pandemic. The Australian health care environment was also transformed by policy changes in March 2020 which expanded telehe...

Governments worldwide implemented various fiscal and monetary measures to address the adverse impacts of COVID-19 on their economies. The paper aims to examine the changes in the monetary policy measures due to COVID-19 and their impact on macroeconomic variables. To explore this relationship, this study utilizes fortnightly data from 2020 to 2023...

This study explores the effects of war on human resource development in Afghanistan using non-linear autoregressive distributed lags (NARDL) and asymmetric causality analysis. The results of the NARDL bound test support an asymmetric long-run relationship between predictors. It reveals that positive and negative shocks from the per capita cost of w...

Psychological distress (PD) is a major health problem that affects all aspects of health-related quality of life including physical, mental and social health, leading to a substantial human and economic burden. Studies have revealed a concerning rise in the prevalence of PD and various mental health conditions among Australians, particularly in fem...

The Australian agricultural sector is of high importance as a predominant contributor to GDP and export earnings. However, rapid global warming and climate change may pose obstacles to agricultural exports. Existing literature shows that the issue is not receiving enough attention from policymakers, researchers, and academicians as it should. There...

Background Socioeconomic inequalities in health and their determinants have been studied extensively over the past few decades. However, the role of parenting style and parents’ couple relationships in explaining mental health inequalities is limited. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the distributional impact of parenting style (angry pare...

There currently exists no comprehensive and up-to date overview on the financial impact of the different adverse events covered by the Patient Safety Indicators (PSIs) from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. We conducted a retrospective case-control study using propensity score matching on a national administrative data set of 1 millio...

The war in Afghanistan left significantly negative consequences in all spheres of its society, leading the country to the highest levels of poverty, hunger, and environmental damage. This study explores the long-run impact of civil wars on environmental degradation in Afghanistan using the conceptual framework of the Environmental Kuznets Curve and...

Identifying and determining the multitude of reasons behind school absences of students is often challenging. This study aims to uncover the hidden reasons for school absence in children and adolescents. The analysis is conducted on a national survey that includes 2967 Australian children and adolescents aged 11–17. The Apriori association rule gen...

Background Despite the established positive association between patient experience and patient volume, the relationship between patient experience and the financial performance of hospitals has not been studied thoroughly. Methods To investigate this relationship, we used longitudinal data from 132 Swiss acute-care hospitals from 2016 to 2019 to e...

Link between environmental degradation and agricultural trade balance (ATB) is an under investigated issue. This article, therefore, investigates the issue for Australia using the data of 1988–2021. In this investigation when a linear model is applied, support for short‐run impact is revealed. However, linear model is unable to explore the asymmetr...

Socioeconomic status affects individuals’ health behaviors and contributes to a complex relationship between health and development. Due to this complexity, the relationship between SES and health behaviors is not yet fully understood. This literature review, therefore, aims to assess the association between socioeconomic status and health behavior...

Aim: In this study, we aimed to identify the determinants of four different forms of mental health service usage (general health services, school counselling, telephone, and online services), and the number of mental health services accessed (single and multiple) by Australian adolescents aged 13-17 years. We also measured socioeconomic inequality...

Understanding the elusive reasons behind school refusal and absenteeism, which often vary, poses a challenge. This study aimed to uncover the hidden reasons for school absence in children and adolescents, aware of the negative consequences. A national survey of 2967 Australian children and adolescents aged 11 to 17 was conducted. The Apriori associ...

Purpose Mental health issues of young minds are at the threshold of all development and possibilities. Obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD), separation anxiety disorder (SAD), and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are three of the most common mental illness affecting children and adolescents. Several studies have been conducted on appr...

Purpose: The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic imposes serious short-term and long-term health costs on populations. Restrictive government policy measures decrease the risks of infection, but produce similarly serious social, mental health, and economic problems. Citizens have varying preferences about the desirability of restrictive policies, and govern...

The COVID-19 pandemic reshaped every aspect of life, including food safety. Understanding food safety behaviour at home is necessary for developing effective strategies to mitigate foodborne disease during and after this pandemic. This study administered a cross-sectional survey among 503 domestic food handlers to examine the food handlers’ food sa...

Objective The primary aim of this study was to identify clusters of lifestyle and health behaviours and explore their associations with health outcomes in a nationally representative sample of Australian adolescents. Methods The study participants were 3127 adolescents aged 14–15 years who participated in the eighth wave of the birth cohort of the...

Objective: This study sought to evaluate the excess outpatient healthcare cost for Australian children associated with unintentional injuries incurred in childhood. The cross-sectional relationship between injuries that required medical attention, with or without hospitalization, and the incurred healthcare cost was investigated within a longitudin...

This article aims to uncover the asymmetric labor-market consequences of the long-run civil war in Afghanistan by employing a non-linear autoregressive distributed lags (NARDL) model and an asymmetric causality technique over the period from 2004Q3 to 2020Q4. The findings from the NARDL model reveal that the positive asymmetric shocks from the cost...

Background Food insecurity indicates the difficulty of constantly obtaining adequate food because of limited economic resources. Food insecurity challenges the desired health outcomes. Although extensive literature has examined the associations between food security and health, low-wage informal sector workers have been less frequently addressed in...

Objective: To investigate to what extent childhood asthma increases publicly funded healthcare costs. We aim to investigate the cross-sectional relationship between asthma and healthcare costs among children aged two to eighteen years and, in longitudinal analyses, whether costs increase with an increase in the duration of asthma prevalence. Meth...

The present study aims to assess the prospects for cleaner production (CP) and sustainable development (SD) of informally operated small manufacturing enterprises, which are frequently blamed for uncontrolled waste disposal and causing pollution to the environment. The economic efficiency level of these firms has been explored to this end, and the...

Any long-term medical condition or disability among children is a significant health issue. This study measured the incidence rate of any medical condition or disability among children from a nationally representative birth cohort, then used the random effect parametric survival regression model to assess whether the hazard of any medical condition...

This study examines the effects of long-run civil wars on healthcare, which is an important component of human capital development and their causality nexus in Afghanistan using the MVAR (modified vector autoregressive) approach and the Granger non-causality model covering data period 2002Q3-2020Q4. The primary results support a significant long-ru...

Liquidated damages mechanisms have been analyzed from a legal perspective and applied to real-world contracts. Due to the lack of application of LDs to common agency theory, this research explores whether the liquidated damages mechanism can resolve principal-principal conflicts under common agency. We combine the moral hazard model of common agenc...

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is extremely common, but early detection is difficult because symptoms do not appear until puberty. Therefore, it is crucial to identify the causes of this mental illness. Making an early and accurate diagnosis of OCD in children and adolescents is essential to preventing the long-term problems. Several studies h...

Purpose – Based on the fact that punishment and subsidy mechanisms affect the anti-epidemic incentives of major participants in a society, the issue of this paper is how the penalty and subsidy mechanisms affect the decisions of governments, businesses, and consumers during Corona Virus Disease 2019 (COVID-19). Design/Methodology/approach - This p...

The understanding of the role of informal employment in economic growth is important to facilitate developing countries in safeguarding the decent work, productive employment, and inclusive growth agenda mentioned in Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) 8. The present study attempts to this end by investigating the role of informal employment on eco...

Purpose A systematic, PRISMA-guided literature review was conducted using four databases (ProQuest, PubMed, EconLit and Scopus) to analyze research published between February 2020 and August 2021. This review included 31 studies out of 1,248 that were identified. Design/methodology/approach In addition to the serious health issues it causes, sever...

Background: Despite the high rate of teenage pregnancy in Nigeria and host of negative medical, social and economic consequences that are associated with the problem, relatively few studies have examined socioeconomic inequality in teenage pregnancy. Understanding the key factors associated with socioeconomic inequality in teenage pregnancy is ess...

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted all sectors of the tourism industry, particularly air transportation. However, air transport remains an important contributor to economic growth globally. Thus, this study examines whether air transport (a proxy for tourism) stimulates economic growth to validate the air-transportation-led growth hypothesis (ALGH)...

Background Occupational stress is common among nurses and is thought to be one of the key factors for the global shortages of nurses. To the best of our knowledge, no study has been done to assess occupational stress among Bangladeshi nurses. This study aimed to investigate the association of sociodemographic characteristics and occupational charac...

Climate change is an increasingly serious problem, resulting in significant environmental degradation, and various policies and regulations have been adopted to achieve zero-carbon with the goal of ameliorating this issue. To end this, along with economic growth, governments should consider human activities such as tourism and energy consumption, w...

Food contamination and food adulteration are widely known public health issues in Bangladesh. This research explores consumers' perceptions of food hazards and safe food purchasing strategies. The study uses data from a survey of 450 primary household food purchasers in an urban supermarket and two traditional bazaars in urban and regional areas. T...

This study explores the war-growth nexus in Afghanistan, a country where war-torn acts inform resource allocation. Employing the asymmetric ARDL, dynamic multipliers, and asymmetric causality techniques, the initial results confirm the existence of a long-run asymmetric nexus amid predictors. The asymmetric ARDL results indicate that a positive asy...

Workers’ living standards have recently deteriorated in the service sector throughout the world, although a few decades ago, service was among the fastest growing sectors in industrialised nations. However, in recent years, in service sectors tourism especially has been drying up. This paper examines the symmetric and asymmetric effects of tourism,...

Most developing economies have recently experienced significant economic growth without corresponding substantial poverty reduction and improved population wellbeing. This paper uses a nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag model to explore the growth-poverty relationship in Tanzania using annual time series data on per capita consumption expendi...

Background Despite the declining trends worldwide, infant and child mortality rates are still high in many African countries. These high rates are problematic; therefore, this study attempts to explore the contributing factors that cause high infant and child mortality rates in 14 African countries using panel data for the period of 2000–2018. In p...

Background: The incidence of any medical condition (e.g., sight, hearing, and speech problems, blackouts, chronic pain etc.) or disability (e.g., limited use of arms or fingers, legs, and feet, or other physical long-term health condition limiting everyday activities etc.) have been increasing among Australian children in recent decades. Objectiv...

Background The high prevalence of tobacco use in Pakistan poses a substantial health and economic burden to Pakistani individuals, families, and society. However, a comprehensive assessment of the key risk factors of tobacco use in Pakistan is very limited in the literature. A better understanding of the key risk factors of tobacco use is needed to...

This study aims to explore the impact of the informal sector on the sustainability of development. A large panel data set of 50 developing countries that spans over 2010–2019 has been utilized to this end while the informal sector is evaluated in terms of working poverty. Selecting indicators from three dimensions of sustainability, that is, econom...

This paper explores the impacts of informal economic activities and institutional capacity, particularly, corruption control on the environmental quality degradation of emerging economies under the prevailing socio-economic conditions and energy use patterns of the countries. The study utilizes key environmental degradation indicators: Carbon dioxi...

Tourism growth is an important component for welfare improvement in the host destination, but it can be associated with environmental degradation. The aim of the current study is to assess the environmental impacts of tourism growth in Tanzania, using time series data for the period 1995 – 2017. It utilizes ecological footprints as a proxy for envi...

Despite a substantial decline in child mortality globally, the high rate of under-five mortality in Nigeria is still one of the main public health concerns. This study investigates inequalities in geographic and socioeconomic factors influencing survival time of children under-five in Nigeria. This is a retrospective cross-sectional quantitative st...

Purpose Although the outbreak of the Corona Virus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) occurred on a global scale, governments from different countries adopted different policies and achieved different anti-epidemic effects. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether and how the government response affected the transmission scale of COVID-19 on the dyn...

This study has investigated the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis and focuses on the resource stock of the country in relation to the selection of environmental degradation indicators. Acknowledging the critical role of the EKC for policy formulation and development strategies, this study has examined the validity of the EKC hypothesis b...

Despite being highly prevalent, adolescent mental health problems are undertreated. To better understand the mental health treatment gap, we assessed the prevalence and correlates of help-seeking, including perceived need for care and access to that care. Data were drawn from Young Minds Matter (YMM) survey—the second Australian child and adolescen...

The impact of the exchange rate (ER) on the trade balance (TB) has been discussed for many years. However, the issue has not been discussed in sufficient depth, especially in relation to the TB of agricultural products. This paper will gauge this impact on Australia, which has much potential for agro‐based trade in the world market. We have applied...

Urbanization, economic growth, and intensity of electricity consumption are the important causative factors of environmental degradation in South Asia. The present study has revealed this while investigating the relationship between the level of CO2 emissions and important economic variables in the context of five South Asian countries. Panel data...

Background Better understanding of the determinants of national life expectancy is crucial for economic development, as a healthy nation is a prerequisite for a wealthy nation. Many socioeconomic, nutritional, lifestyle, genetic and environmental factors can influence a nation’s health and longevity. Environmental degradation is one of the critical...

Background: The incidence of any medical condition (e.g., sight, hearing, and speech problems, blackouts, chronic pain etc.) or disability (e.g., limited use of arms or fingers, legs, and feet, or other physical long-term health condition limiting everyday activities etc.) have been increasing among Australian children in recent decades. Objectives...

Objective This study identifies the clustering of lifestyle and health behaviours in a nationally representative sample of Australian children and adolescents and explores the association of the clusters with obesity, self-rated health and quality of life. Methods The study participants were 3127 children aged 14/15 years who participated in the 8...

Purpose To identify and compare important risk and protective factors associated with suicidality and self-harm among traditional bullying and cyberbullying victims aged 14-17-years in Australia. Design Cross-sectional population-based study. Setting Young Minds Matter, a nationwide survey in Australia. Subjects Adolescents aged 14-17-years (n =...

Background Mental health problems, such as depression in children have far-reaching negative effects on child, family and society as whole. It is necessary to identify the reasons that contribute to this mental illness. Detecting the appropriate signs to anticipate mental illness as depression in children and adolescents is vital in making an early...

Measurement of people’s sustainable wellbeing is important for monitoring and evaluating economic activities. Therefore, there is a need for a statistical approach capturing population’s sustainable wellbeing to complement measures of market activities. Since there are several dimensions of wellbeing, this paper pioneers the measurement of material...

Using comprehensive time use data pertaining to Australian children (aged 10 to 15), we study the link between time inputs – educational activities, sports, and screen time – and cognitive as well as non-cognitive skills. Potential endogeneity of time inputs is addressed by adjusting for a comprehensive set of covariates, including initial skills a...

Purpose – In responding to COVID-19, governments around the world have imposed various restrictions with different levels of success. One important aspect of pandemic control is the willingness of individuals to stay home when possible. The purpose of this paper is to study the impact of government restrictions on human mobility in the United State...

Background: This study investigated the prevalence of wheezing, asthma, and eczema among Australian children using longitudinal data from birth to 15 years of age. This study also examined the association between maternal health status during pregnancy and their offspring's respiratory and allergic morbidities using sex-segregated data. Methods: T...

Background: Socioeconomic status (SES) is an important determinant of health behaviors in individuals and contributes to a complex relationship with health. Because of this complexity, the relationship between SES and health behavior is still unclear. Thus, this literature review aims to assess the association between socioeconomic inequalities and...

Background Research supports a robust association between bullying, mental disorder, self-harm, and suicidal ideation in adolescence; however, the relation between bullying victimization and access to mental health services is incompletely understood. This study investigated whether traditional and cyberbullying victimization were associated with a...

Background The population-based classification of asthma severity is varied and needs further classification. This study identified clusters of asthma and related comorbidities of Australian children aged 12–13 years; determined health outcome differences among clusters; and investigated the associations between maternal asthma and other health con...

Purpose – Based on the fact that punishment and subsidy mechanisms affect the anti-epidemic incentives of major participants in a society, the issue of this paper is how the penalty and subsidy mechanisms affect the decisions of governments, businesses, and consumers during Corona Virus Disease 2019. The goal of this paper is to understand strategi...

Background: The mechanism underlying the correlation between bullying victimization, self-harm and suicidality by gender are not well understood. This study, therefore, aimed to investigate whether the mediating effect of mental disorder (depression and anxiety) on the association between bullying victimization, and self-harm and suicidality vary a...

Tourism contributes to the growth of an economy via earning foreign currencies and employment opportunities. However, tourism also contributes to greater energy consumption because of various tourist activities such as hotel accommodations and transportation. This study investigates the long-term cointegrating relationship between international tou...

Background: This study investigated the prevalence of wheezing, asthma, and eczema among Australian children using longitudinal data from birth to 15 years of age. This study also examined the association between maternal health status during pregnancy and their offspring’s respiratory and allergic morbidities using sex-segregated data. Methods: T...

Despite the awareness of the importance of mental health problems among adolescents in developed countries like Australia, inequality has not been widely researched. This study, is therefore, aimed to measure and compare household income-related and area-based socioeconomic inequalities in mental health problems (bullying victimization, mental diso...

Objective This study investigates the associations between maternal health and health-related behaviours (nutrition, physical activity, alcohol consumption and smoking) both during pregnancy and up to 15 months from childbirth and children’s health outcomes during infancy and adolescence (general health, presence of a chronic illness, and physical...

Three minute thesis presentation on the research: "The prevalence of wheezing, asthma and eczema in children and the association of maternal health during pregnancy: a longitudinal study of an Australian birth cohort"

Background: As the burden of cardiovascular disease increases in sub-Saharan Africa, there is a growing need for low-cost interventions to mitigate its impact. Providing self-care health education to patients with chronic heart failure (CHF) is recommended as an intervention to prevent complications, improve quality of life, and reduce financial b...

Objective: This study investigates the associations between maternal health and health-related behaviours (nutrition, physical activity, alcohol consumption and smoking) both during pregnancy and up to 15 months from childbirth and children's health outcomes during infancy and adolescence (general health, presence of a chronic illness, and physical...

Clustering of asthma and related comorbidities and their associations with maternal health during pregnancy: evidence from an Australian birth cohort

Background Although malaria in pregnancy is preventable with the use of intermittent preventive treatment with sulfadoxine–pyrimethamine (IPTp-SP), it still causes maternal morbidity and mortality, in sub-Saharan Africa and Nigeria in particular. Socioeconomic inequality leads to limited uptake of IPTp-SP by pregnant women and is, therefore, a publ...

This study estimates the private average rate of return (ARR) and internal rate of return (IRR) to education in rural Bangladesh. Using data from the Bangladesh Integrated Household Survey (BIHS) 2015, we estimate average returns using the Mincerian method and IRR using the full method, accounting for both the direct and indirect costs of schooling...

After the economic liberalization in mid-2000, Tanzania has assumed that tourism growth spars economic growth due to the consistent significant contribution of tourism sector to the country's annual income. However, there are limited empirical studies that investigated tourism-economic growth relationship in Tanzania. This study aims to investigate...

A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10389-021-01482-5

Background Tuberculosis is one of the major infectious diseases and is both complex and serious. It is spread from person to person through the air, causing a public health burden, especially in low- and middle-income countries. This study aims to assess the knowledge on tuberculosis and the utilization of Directly-Observed Therapy, Short Course (D...