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This study examines the relevance of information and communication technologies in the effect of gender economic inclusion on environmental sustainability.

The focus is on a panel of 42 sub-Saharan African countries over the period 2005–2020. The empirical evidence is based on generalized method of moments. The environmental sustainability indicator used is CO2 emissions per capita. Three indicators of women’s economic inclusion are considered: female labour force participation, female employment and female unemployment. The chosen ICT indicators are mobile phone penetration, Internet penetration and fixed broadband subscriptions.

The results show that: (1) fixed broadband subscriptions represent the most relevant ICT moderator of gender economic inclusion for an effect on CO2 emissions; (2) negative net effects are apparent for the most part with fixed broadband subscriptions (3) both positive ICT thresholds (i.e., critical levels for complementary policies) and negative ICT thresholds (i.e., minimum ICT levels for negative net effects) are provided; (4) ICT synergy effects are apparent for female unemployment, but not for female employment. In general, the joint effect of ICTs or their synergies and economic inclusion should be a concern for policymakers in order to better ensure sustainable development. Moreover, the relevant ICT policy thresholds and mobile phone threshold for complementary policy are essential in promoting a green economy.

The study complements the extant literature by assessing linkages between information technology, gender economic inclusion and environmental sustainability.

This article employs a panel vector autoregression (PVAR) model to examine the relationship between digital financial inclusion (DFI), economic growth (EG), and gender equality (GE) across different levels of financial development.

Based on the current financial development dynamics, this study applies the PVAR method to two groups of countries: the first group represents the high financial development group, and the second group represents the low financial development group, during the period from 2015 to 2021.

The findings from impulse response functions reveal that digital financial inclusion fosters economic growth in nations with advanced financial systems, while simultaneously mitigating gender inequality. Conversely, in countries with less developed financial infrastructures, digital financial inclusion stimulates economic growth but exacerbates gender disparities. Moreover, the variance decomposition analysis indicates that the linkage between economic growth, digital financial inclusion, and gender inequality is more intertwined in countries with limited financial development than in those with well-established financial systems.

Effective deployment of new technologies relies heavily on technological infrastructure. This policy focuses on constructing and developing information technology infrastructure to create favorable conditions for the implementation of new DFI technologies. This study also emphasizes promoting equitable education and training by ensuring that both women and men have equal opportunities to access quality education and training. This may involve investing in early childhood education, providing access to primary education, and offering scholarships to women in technology, science, and engineering fields.

Despite the longstanding male dominance in the socio-politico-economic spheres, recent decades have witnessed remarkable improvements in gender inclusion. Although the issue of gender inclusion has been widely documented, answers to the question of whether institutional arrangements and information technology shape gender inclusion remain contentious. This study, therefore, empirically examines the effects of institutional quality and information and communication technology (ICT) penetration on gender inclusion on a global scale.

To control for the endogeneity of modeled variables and cross-sectional dependence inherent with large panel datasets, the study employs the Driscoll-Kraay fixed effects (DKFE) and the system generalised method of moments (GMM) estimators for a panel of 142 countries from 1996 to 2020.

The empirical findings from the DKFE and system GMM estimators reveal that strong institutions significantly enhance gender inclusion. Moreover, by disaggregating institutional quality into various governance indicators, we show that besides corruption control, which has a positive but insignificant effect on women’s empowerment, other governance indicators significantly enhance gender inclusion. Furthermore, there is evidence that various ICT measures promote gender inclusion.

The study results suggest that policymakers in developing countries should implement stringent measures to curb corruption. Moreover, policymakers in low-income countries should create avenues to facilitate women’s access to ICTs. Hence, policymakers in low-income countries should create and equip ICT training centers and render them accessible to all categories of women. Furthermore, developed countries with high-tech knowledge could help developing countries by organizing free training workshops and sensitization campaigns concerning the use of ICTs vis-à-vis women empowerment in various fields of life.

The present study fills a significant research gap by comprehensively exploring the nexuses between governance, ICT penetration and the socio-politico-economic dimensions of gender inclusion from a global perspective. Besides the paucity of studies in this regard, the few existing studies have been focused on either region and country-specific case studies in developed or developing economies. Moreover, this study is timely, given the importance placed on gender inclusion (SDG5), quality of institutions (SDG16) and ICT penetration (SDG9) in the 2015–2030 global development agenda.

Just transition is a fundamental concept for supply chain management but neither discipline pays attention to the other and little is known about how supply chains can be orchestrated as socioecological systems to manage these transitions. Building from a wide range of just transition examples, this paper explores just transition to understand how to move beyond instrumental supply chain practices to supply chains functioning in harmony with the planet and its people.

Building from a systematic review of 72 papers, the paper identifies just transition examples while interpreting them through the theoretical lens of supply chain management, providing valuable insights to help research and practice understand how to achieve low-carbon economies through supply chain management in environmentally and socially just ways.

The paper defines, elaborates, and extends the just transition construct by developing a transition taxonomy with two key dimensions. The purpose dimension (profit or shared outcomes) and the governance dimension (government-/industry-led versus civil society-involved), generating four transition archetypes. Most transitions projects are framed around the Euro- and US-centric, capitalist standards of development, leading to coloniality as well as economic and cultural depletion of communities. Framing just transition in accordance with context-specific plural values, the paper provides an alternative perspective to the extractive transition concept. This can guide supply chain management to decarbonise economies and societies by considering the rights of nature, communities and individuals.

Introducing just transition into the supply chain management domain, this paper unifies the various conceptualisations of just transition into a holistic understanding, providing a new foundation for supply chain management research.

The paper aims to examine the role played by property tax in influencing strategic decisions regarding marital separation and divorce in Italian municipalities.

The empirical analysis is conducted on a sample of 6,458 Italian municipalities by applying the ordinary least squares (OLS) and instrumental variables (IVs) approaches.

The estimation results show a small increase in marital separations and divorces as the difference between the municipal secondary and primary home tax rate increases. Specifically, an increase of 1‰ in the property tax rate differentials is accompanied by an increase of six marital separations and four divorces per 1,000 inhabitants.

The main limitation of the analysis is that the strategic behavior of the married couple is inferred from econometric analysis with data aggregated at the municipal level. To investigate this phenomenon more precisely, it would be useful to have individual data collected by surveys on strategic divorce decisions due to property tax incentives.

This study contributes to the scant existing literature on the tax incentives for strategic divorce. It is the first study to empirically investigate the effects of property tax on separation and divorce decisions by investigating the Italian context. In Italy, a property tax was introduced in 1993, encouraging “false” divorces by spouses with a second home since the tax on the secondary home was set at a rate higher than that on the primary residence. Moreover, there were no tax deductions and no additional tax breaks on the secondary home, while they were established on the primary one. Higher property taxes and the absence of tax breaks on the secondary home may have encouraged a strategic behavior whereby many married couples filed for false separation and divorce in order to recover part of property tax rebates.

Mainland Tanzania has seen two decades of significant social policy reforms and transformations in its social and economic structures, whilst the country continues to grapple with persisting gender inequalities. This article examines Tanzania's social policy developments from a gender perspective. The authors analyse the level, reach and quality of social policy delivery to working-age women across the areas of health policy, social protection and employment policy during 2000–2021.

The article draws on qualitative research deploying the scoping review method. The data consist of diverse secondary materials, including academic publications, government policy documents, relevant statistics and other types of “grey” literature.

Tanzania has made significant advancements in the legal frameworks around welfare provision and has instituted increasingly gender-responsive government policy plans. The health and social protection sectors, in particular, have witnessed the introduction of large-scale measures expanding social policy implementation. However, social policy delivery remains two-tiered, with differences in provisions for women in the formal and informal sectors.

Social policy delivery and implementation have increased and diversified in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) during the new millennium, with a growing integration of gender-specific policy objectives. However, limited social policy scholarship has focused on the gendered effects of broader social policy models in SSA. The article remedies the concomitant knowledge gaps by examining various social policies and their impacts on working-age women in Mainland Tanzania. The authors also engage with the theoretical welfare regime literature and present an analytical framework for gender-sensitive assessment of emerging social policy models in the Global South.

This study sheds light on the impact of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) on self-employed women in Mauritius and delves into their coping strategies amid unprecedented circumstances.

The study employs a comprehensive methodology encompassing both qualitative and quantitative approaches. Qualitative analysis is conducted via interviews with self-employed women in Mauritius, capturing their experience with COVID-19. Quantitative analysis uses survey data from 732 firms to investigate factors affecting online sales, a major survival strategy adopted by businesses.

The study finds a notable trend wherein many interviewed women have transitioned their businesses online – a pivot that stands out as a common response within the sample. The quantitative analysis indicates the significance of a strong online presence, particularly on social media and web-based platforms designed for the sale of goods and services. These factors correlate with higher online sales, potentially enhancing resilience during pandemic-induced lockdown periods.

This study stands out for its originality, representing the first study investigating how women entrepreneurs in Mauritius have navigated the challenges posed by the COVID-19 crisis.

Compared to the years prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, more workers today seemingly have choice over where, when and how they do their work. However, gender inequalities at work and at home persist, which may impact perceptions of choice. Thus, researchers must investigate the potential impact of gender and domestic responsibilities on perceptions of work-related options, including perceptions of workspace choice.

Using an original dataset with workers in North America, South America, Europe and Asia (N = 3,147), the authors conducted logistic regression analyses to explore whether workers felt they had a choice in where they do their work (workspace choice). In addition to gender, the authors considered the effect of domestic responsibilities (childcare and housework) on worker perceptions of workspace choice.

In the paper's initial regression, the authors found that men (OR: 1.24; 95%CI 1.04–1.48) as well as workers reporting that a partner was responsible for all or most of the housework (OR: 1.80; 95%CI 1.34–2.40) and childcare (OR 1.51; 95%CI 1.09–2.09) reported feeling a greater sense of workspace choice. Simultaneously, follow-up regression analyses found that women and men whose partners had a greater share of domestic responsibility had amplified perceptions of choice. However, surprisingly, men who claimed primary responsibility for domestic work also reported more choice over workspace.

Using an international sample, the authors explore gender inequities in worker perceptions of workspace choice. The authors' findings suggest that domestic responsibilities interact with gender in interesting ways, leading to differences in perceptions of choice in the post-pandemic workplace.

This study investigates the relationships among digital transformation, technological innovation, industry–university–research collaborations and labor income share in manufacturing firms.

The relationships are tested using an empirical method, constructing regression models, by collecting 1,240 manufacturing firms and 9,029 items listed on the A-share market in China from 2013 to 2020.

The results indicate that digital transformation has a positive effect on manufacturing companies’ labor income share. Technological innovation can mediate the effect of digital transformation on labor income share. Industry–university–research cooperation can positively moderate the promotion effect of digital transformation on labor income share but cannot moderate the mediating effect of technological innovation. Heterogeneity analysis also found that firms without service-based transformation and nonstate-owned firms are better able to increase their labor income share through digital transformation.

This study provides a new path to increase the labor income share of enterprises to achieve common prosperity, which is important for manufacturing enterprises to better transform and upgrade to achieve high-quality development.

The scaling of social initiatives is important to achieve broad social impact based on successful small-scale experiments. This paper focuses on the influence of the characteristics of the initiators of social initiatives on scaling processes. The limited literature on this topic highlights two critical actor characteristics: high entrepreneurial skills and a central position in the area. Both characteristics influence two critical components of the scaling process: mobilizing stakeholders and focusing on retaining effectiveness. The purpose of this paper is to explore these complex relationships in a deductive analysis and to use these findings for an inductive analysis to generate new insights and extend our academic understanding.

A comparative qualitative study of 20 social initiatives in the Dutch social sector was conducted, including 48 in-depth interviews with initiators and stakeholders in three different areas – mental health, debt and labour participation.

High entrepreneurial skills are more important for mobilizing stakeholders and focusing on retention of effectiveness than the position of the initiators, but these are a condition rather than a guarantee. Creating space for scaling and investing in measuring effectiveness in other contexts are also important.

By combining the literature on social entrepreneurship and public innovation and conducting an empirical study, our study provides a broad and nuanced picture and brings precision to our understanding of the relationships between initiators' entrepreneurial skills and position and the scaling process.