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The purpose of this paper is to investigate humanitarian supply chains in the context of the Ukrainian crisis as example of complex emergency. The paper focuses on a selection of support modes: in-kind donations, cash-based assistance and local procurement.

This paper adopts a case-study approach and interpretive paradigm. Findings are based on the analysis of primary sources including interviews with three Polish humanitarian organizations, internal documents, and secondary sources such as published reports.

Findings indicate that in a middle-income urbanized country such as Ukraine non-standard modes such as cash transfer programs and local procurement can be employed, since the necessary infrastructure and market are operational. However, each mode has limitations, so they should match the local context and the needs of diverse social groups.

The findings and recommendations are specific to the case analyzed, Ukraine, and its socio-economic context. The research contributes to discussions about mode selection, stressing the links between mode, stage of the disaster response and local context.

Applying cash transfers and local procurement can reduce supply chain costs, such as transport and warehousing. Shortened supply chains enable faster responses and increased agility.

Cash transfers and procurement involve the local community and beneficiaries, and can better fulfill needs maintaining people’s dignity. However, for vulnerable groups and those in conflict zones, in-kind goods are a better option.

The author argues that the much-discussed dichotomy of cash or goods does not reflect reality; local and regional procurement should be added as important support modes in middle-income countries in crisis.

This research investigates how subsidy programs in Vietnam's residential electricity market affect consumers' well-being.

Two perspectives are employed: cash transfer and quantity-based subsidy. The effectiveness of cash transfer is measured in three ways: benefit incidence, beneficiary incidence and materiality. The quantity-based subsidy is established under the increasing block rate pricing, with the first two block rates being lower than the marginal cost. To improve the quantity-based subsidy, the research examines the consumer surplus under four proposals.

The results show that both types of subsidies are ineffective in supporting the poor.

In order to achieve a more equal distribution among households, the subsidy program should remove all subsidized blocks and reflect the full marginal cost. Changes should be made to the price structure regarding both marginal price and intervals.

To mitigate the impact of the quantity-based subsidy, the government should improve the cash transfer by reducing extortion and improving targeting efficiency, especially for poor households living in rented houses.

This paper is the first to discuss the welfare effect of the electricity subsidy in Vietnam. First, it comprehensively evaluates the cash transfer subsidy in Vietnam. Second, it suggests a modification in the residential electricity tariff.

The purpose of this study is to explore what design principles need to be considered in Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems for humanitarian organizations (HOs) to enable agile, adaptive and aligned (Triple-A) humanitarian supply chain capabilities and digitize humanitarian operations.

This study follows an embedded case study approach with a humanitarian medical relief organization, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), which engaged in a multiyear ERP design at its humanitarian field missions.

This research shows that ERP systems for humanitarian organizations should be designed as unique systems addressing humanitarian organizations' challenges and unique missions, their value generation processes, and resource base in an effort to improve organizational performance. This study presents 12 general design principles that are unique for humanitarian organizations. These design principles provide a high-level structure of guidance under which specific requirements can be further defined and engineered to achieve success.

The results of this study are based on a single case study limiting generalizability. However, the case study was analyzed and presented as an embedded case study with five autonomous subunits using different business processes and following different adoption and implementation approaches. Therefore, the findings are derived based on considerable variance reflective of humanitarian organizations beyond MSF.

This study recognizes that HOs have unique routines that standard commercial ERP packages do not address easily at the field level. The primary contribution of this research is a set of design principles that consider these unique routines and guide ERP development in practice. National and international HOs that are planning to implement information systems, private companies that are trading partners of HOs as well as vendors of ERP systems that are looking for new opportunities would all benefit from this research.

This study fills the gap in the humanitarian literature regarding the design of ERP systems for humanitarian organizations that enable Triple–A supply chain capabilities and it advances the knowledge of the challenges of ERP design by HOs in the context of humanitarian operations.

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 paper explores how global pandemic crises affect the financial vulnerability of municipalities.

This paper is developed from the relevant literature an analytical framework to examine municipal financial vulnerability before a global pandemic crisis and in its immediate aftermath by mapping and systematizing its dimensions and sources. To illustrate how it can be used and evaluate its robustness and flexibility, such a tool was applied to Portugal and Italy, two countries that particularly suffered from the Covid-19 crisis.

The application of the analytical framework has shown how financially vulnerable municipalities are to global pandemic crises. Financial vulnerability relates to issues ranging from institutional design to internal financial conditions and the perception of the capacity to cope with a crisis. Results further reveal that vulnerability has an inherent contingent nature in time and space and can lead to paradoxical outcomes.

This paper provides a tool that can be useful for both academic and public policy purposes, to further appreciate municipal financial vulnerability, especially during crises.

Municipalities can use the framework to better manage their financial vulnerability, strengthening their anticipatory and copying capacities, while oversight authorities can use it to help municipalities become less financially vulnerable or, at least, more aware of their financial vulnerability.

Municipal financial vulnerability to global shocks has not been explored extensively. Also, the Covid-19 pandemic is different from previous global crises as it affected society overnight with the implementation of lockdown and social distancing measures.

This paper investigates the relationship between remittances, institutional quality and investment in Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries using data from 2004 to 2018.

The two-stage least squares (2SLS) estimator is the main methodology used, while the system generalized method of moments (Sys-GMM) technique is employed to test the robustness of the results.

The results show a positive and significant impact of remittances on investment in SSA. The findings further reveal a substitutional linkage between remittances and institutions in promoting investment. In essence, remittances serve as investment capital in countries with poor institutions. The results also show that the marginal significance of remittances as a source of funds for investment decreases in countries with well-developed institutions.

The sample excludes some of the SSA countries due to the unavailability of data.

In the face of current institutional weaknesses, there is a need for SSA countries to prioritize policies that encourage the effective use of remittances for business activities. Furthermore, SSA countries must improve their economic freedom and democratic practices by reducing government size, protecting property rights, and promoting respect for political and civil rights.

This is the first study to analyze the relationship between remittances, institutional quality and investment in SSA. It also provides a novel framework for future research on the remittance–investment nexus.

There has been an avalanche of global natural disasters in recent times. In recent years approximately 210 million people were affected, an estimated economic cost of US$153bn was incurred and 68,000 deaths were recorded. This was a work up call that made it imperative for humanitarian actors to impetuously adopt information and communication technologies (ICTs) to timeously assist affected populations in disaster prevention, mitigation response and recovery However, the use of ICTs in the humanitarian field is still at its infancy in most third world countries. The purpose of this study was, therefore, to evaluate the utilization of ICTs in humanitarian relief operations associated with Cyclone Idai in Zimbabwe.

Using a pragmatic approach, the study gathered data using semistructured questionnaires that were triangulated with interviews of humanitarian staff that were involved in Cyclone Idai relief efforts.

An observed suboptimal utilization of ICTs was further disadvantaged by the inequitable distribution of communication infrastructure. However, despite the suboptimal usage, there was a significant positive influence of ICT adoption on effectiveness, efficiency and flexibility in humanitarian relief operations.

Optimal use of ICTs has the potential to revolutionize humanitarian supply chain management. A smooth transition to new technologies is recommended in which personnel are given professional development opportunities on a regular basis.

Humanitarian logistics has for a long time been argued to be a new discipline. Now that even the Journal of Humanitarian Logistics and Supply Chain Management (JHLSCM) has existed over a decade, it is time to take a closer look at its evolution. This article provides some understanding for the developments of humanitarian logistics over the past decade, reveals current trends and discovers what lies behind the curtains in the humanitarian logistics and supply chain management discipline.

This article brings in developments and discussions in humanitarian logistics practice into the research domain.

The article conveys the concerns of humanitarian logistics practitioners to research. These include the backlash from the COVID-19 pandemic as a prime current concern, and also other longer-term issues and developments.

The themes identified in the article can be used to inform a research agenda in humanitarian logistics and supply chain management. The article revisits a framework of global events and their cascading impacts to include non-linearities and multiple disruptions from evolutionary disasters such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

The article argues for more collaborative and co-designed research to increase the relevance and impact of humanitarian logistics.

Wider societal views are brought into the area of humanitarian logistics.

The article highlights the gaps that remain in humanitarian logistics and supply chain management research.

The study, by focusing on a context dominated by firms with a concentrated ownership, in which type-II agency problems (principal-principal conflicts) may occur, aims to depict which board configurations may be effective in protecting minority shareholders by mitigating the risk of controlling shareholders' expropriation via cash holdings.

The research adopts a configurational approach and empirically conducts a fuzzy set/qualitative comparative analysis on a sample of 268 Italian listed companies.

The analysis depicts three combinations of board configurations and ownership structures that can be considered effective, namely Active Independent Control, Female Active Control and Double Internal Control.

The study revisits the topic of the risk of expropriation via cash holdings in a type-II agency problem framework and delineates the meaning of board effectiveness in a mature context ruled by family firms, like Italy. Furthermore, by drawing on a configurational approach, it overcomes the causality relationship between each board characteristic and cash holdings policies and reasons from a “bundle” perspective.

Basic income (BI) is predicted to be the major economic intervention in response to raising income inequality and accelerating technological progress. Financing is often the first question that arises when discussing a BI. A thorough answer to this question will determine the sustainability of any BI program. However, BI experiments implemented worldwide have not answered this question. This paper explores two options for a BI program in Australia: (1) BI and (2) top-up basic income (TBI).

The authors employ “back-of-the-envelope” calculations with the latest publicly available data on income distribution, the poverty line and the share of income tax in the government revenue to estimate the costs of implementing BI in Australia.

Even without any change in the current tax regulations, the TBI option, which requires a contribution of 2–3% disposable income from net contributors, will guarantee that no Australian family lives under the current national poverty line. The BI for all options is not financially feasible under the current tax and transfer regulations because it requires an additional tax rate of at least 42% of disposable income from net contributors.

The results of this study can serve as inputs for the design and implementation of BI options in Australia and similar countries.

This is the first paper that examines the macroeconomic effects of BI options in Australia.