Women’s advancement and consequential gender equality have significant implications for human capital formation, increase in labour productivity, employment creation, poverty reduction, and overall socio-economic and human development. So, inclusive growth and sustainable development would not be possible without women’s empowerment and gender equality. Thus, targeting women’s empowerment is extensively relevant for Asian countries. In this context, this article explored the impact of the gender factors on the economic growth of 30 Asian economies over the period from 1997 to 2015 by using panel autoregressive distributive lag (ARDL) model. It provides the evidence of an overall positive impact of the gender parity index of health, education, employment and democratic representation on the economic growth of Asia in the long run. Therefore, gender equality is an important determinant of economic growth in Asian countries, and hence, should be on board while planning for the empowerment of women.

Traditionally, conditions under which superplastic deformation of poly crystalline material takes place include certain ranges of temperatures, strain rates and some limitations on the grain size. However neither exact criteria, nor mathematically formulated and determined domain of superplasticity are currently developed. In this article attempts are made to formulate the notion of the superplastic domain and its boundaries. To illustrate the behavior of the material near the boundary of the domain the results of the experiments on Ti-6A1-4V alloy with p-annealed microstructure are presented

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Deformation softening is quite often observed during hot working of different alloys. Steels, aluminium, titanium or nickel alloys can demonstrate a decrease in flow stress under active deformation at constant temperatures and strain rates. Though the background microstructural mechanisms as well as the softening rates can be quite different, the treatment of such processes requires special attention. Deformation softening can cause significant non-uniformity of the metal flow resulting in flow localization, formation of shear bands and variation of the microstructure across the workpiece. This paper is devoted to the investigation of the specific issues which arise in this respect in FEM simulation of processes involving softening. The possible role of softening in shear band formation is studied using numerical simulation and physical modelling. The effect of the softening rate on the probability of flow localization is discussed. The interplay of deformation softening with the stain rate and temperature sensitivity is demonstrated using as an example the simulation of Equal Channel Angular Pressing (ECAP). An approach to account for the deformation softening in FEM simulations via process modelling of the microstructure refinement is proposed.