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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.

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 aims to examine the relationship between financial inclusion, CO₂ emissions and financial sustainability across 17 African countries.

Data were sourced from the World Development Indicators for the period 2004-2021. The study performs the principal component analysis, panel fixed effects model and quantile regression estimations to investigate the relationship between financial inclusion, CO₂ emissions and financial sustainability.

The study finds that an increase in automated teller machine (ATM) penetration rate, savings and credits increases CO₂ emissions. Findings also reveal that financial sustainability reduces financial inclusion, with significant negative effects on the conditional mean of CO₂ emissions and the conditional distribution of CO₂ emissions across quantiles.

This study is beneficial for policymakers, particularly in the age of digitalization and drive for low-carbon emissions, to develop green credits for energy players and investors to take up renewable and green energy projects characterized by high levels of carbon storage and carbon capture. Further, the banking sector’s credits and liquid assets should be used to finance alternative banking energy-related equipment and services, such as solar photovoltaic wireless ATMs, and fewer bank branches.

Theoretically, the quality of representation is likely to be enhanced when more societal segments are included in formal political structures. An interesting question, however, is whether a similar correlation holds empirically outside established Western democracies. In the 2015 Egyptian parliament, women representation achieved an all-time high of 14.9% of total seats – nearly four times the historical Egyptian average. It is asked whether female legislators riding this unprecedent tide were different from their male colleagues in terms of their socio-economic backgrounds. But more importantly, the authors examine whether this increased representation led to any change in inclusion of more women’s issues in the legislative agenda, and how traditional topics are debated.

The authors conducted a content analysis of selected parliamentary scripts – generating on an original data set – to trace the topics and interventions raised by female MPs. The authors draw on the extensive literature on women’s representation, giving special attention to the structure versus agency dichotomy in this quest.

The authors conclude that female MPs were as active in parliamentary debates as to their male colleagues. Moreover, women did stress women issues more than men. The results indicate that the inclusion of traditionally under-represented groups does affect parliamentary agendas.

The authors conducted a content analysis of selected parliamentary scripts – generating on an original data set – to trace the topics and interventions raised by female MPs based on a case study of the 2015 Egyptian parliament.

The purpose of this paper is to determine the impact of private and public initiatives (financial literacy, entrepreneurship, remote work and government aid) on individual job loss and decrease in income during the COVID-19 pandemic in Peru.

The authors used an unbalanced panel data analysis with the National Household Survey for 2019–2020. The hypotheses are tested with a probit panel data model since the dependent variables are binary.

The study findings indicate that financial preparedness reduced the probability of having a decrease in income, but only to informal workers in metropolitan Lima. Furthermore, entrepreneurship helped mainly female informal workers to reduce their probability of becoming unemployed in metropolitan Lima. Besides, the implementation of remote work as a substitute of face-to-face work was not enough to avoid the decrease in income in the case of informal workers and it was only effective to avoid unemployment in the case of formal workers in metropolitan Lima. Finally, public aid proved to be instrumental in mitigating the decrease in income, but only to informal workers in Metropolitan Lima.

The study results only apply for the first year of the pandemic.

Policymakers should focus on increasing the financial preparedness of informal workers, especially in provinces.

Policymakers must expand unemployment benefits, and design public aid programs targeting informal workers in provinces.

This is the first study that analyses the impact of private and public initiatives on the decrease in income and unemployment situation of Peruvian individuals during the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the adjustment of government redistributive policies in Scandinavian and Mediterranean countries following changes in income inequality over the period 1980–2021.

The authors first modelled the time-varying dynamics between income inequality and redistribution and then used a non-linear framework to test for the existence of asymmetries and cointegration in their long-run relationship. The authors used two complementary measures of inequality – the share of total income accruing to top percentile income holders and the ratio of the share of total income accruing to top decile income holders divided by that accumulated by the bottom 50% – and computed redistribution as the difference between the two inequality indicators before and after taxes and transfers.

The authors found that the sign of the relationship between income inequality and redistribution is mostly positive and time-varying. Overall, the authors also found evidence that the impact of increases in inequality on redistributive measures is higher than that of decreases. Finally, the authors obtained a significant long-run relationship between both variables in all countries except Denmark and Spain. These results hold for both Scandinavian and Mediterranean countries.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper to account for the potential existence of non-linearities and to examine the asymmetries in the adjustment of redistributive policies to increases in income inequality using alternative income inequality metrics.

Adolescent pregnancy stands as a societal challenge, compelling young individuals to prematurely discontinue their education. Conversely, an expansion of high school education can potentially diminish rates of adolescent pregnancy, given that educational attainment stands as the foremost risk factor influencing sexual initiation, the use of contraceptive methods during initial sexual encounters and fertility. The aim of this paper is to analyze the impact of the implementation of the public educational policy introducing full-time schools (FTS) for high schools in the state of Ceará, Brazil, on early pregnancy rates.

Using the difference-in-differences method with multiple time periods, we measured the average effect of this staggered treatment on the treated municipalities.

The main result indicates a reduction of 0.849 percentage points in the teenage pregnancy rate. Concerning dynamic effects, the establishment of FTS in treated municipalities results in a 1.183–1.953 percentage point decrease in teenage pregnancy rates, depending on the timing of exposure. We explored heterogeneous effects within socioeconomically vulnerable municipalities, yet discerned no impact on this group. Rigorous tests confirm the robustness of the results.

This paper aims to contribute to: (1) the consolidation of research on the subject, given the absence of such research in Brazil to the best of our knowledge; (2) the advancement and analysis of evidence-based public policy and (3) the utilization of novel longitudinal data and methodology to evaluate adolescent pregnancy rates.

This paper aims to investigate the conditional indirect effect of innovativeness on performance via supply chain agility (SCA) in the service industry at higher and lower collaborative relationships.

The hypothesised model is operationalised with survey data from 245 Australian service firms collected via LinkedIn and analysed using structural equation modelling and fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA).

The analysis found that SCA significantly mediates the relationship between innovativeness and performance. Further, the conditional indirect effect of innovativeness on performance via SCA was significant when the collaborative relationship was high. Results also revealed that a configuration of both innovativeness and agility better predicts performance.

This study is an early attempt to investigate SCA in service industries by scrutinizing SCA from an innovative point of view. While previous studies have demonstrated the role of innovativeness in enhancing a firm's performance, this study explores this link further by investigating the conditional indirect effect of innovativeness on performance via SCA at different levels of collaborative relationships.

This research assesses the economic impact of biomass plant installations on Brazilian municipalities, focusing on (1) labor income, (2) sectoral labor income and (3) income inequality.

Municipal data from the Annual Social Information Report, the National Electric Energy Agency and the National Institute of Meteorology spanning 2002 to 2020 are utilized. The Synthetic Difference-in-Differences methodology is employed for empirical analysis, and robustness checks are conducted using the Doubly Robust Difference in Differences and the Double/Debiased Machine Learning methods.

The findings reveal that biomass plant installations lead to an average annual increase of approximately R$688.00 in formal workers' wages and reduce formal income inequality, with notable benefits observed for workers in the industry and agriculture sectors. The robustness tests support and validate the primary results, highlighting the positive implications of renewable energy integration on economic development in the studied municipalities.

This article represents a groundbreaking contribution to the existing literature as it pioneers the identification of the impact of biomass plant installation on formal employment income and local economic development in Brazil. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to uncover such effects. Moreover, the authors comprehensively examine sectoral implications and formal income inequality.

The paper aims to examine the state of electronic service delivery in Bangladesh. It reviews the structure and operation of the “e-service” centers at the district, sub-district (upazila), and union levels by taking an inventory and assessing their contributions.

The paper is based on a review of the functions and operations of the service delivery agencies with reference to the claims made by the government. It is based on secondary materials obtained from academic studies, government documents, relevant websites, and media reports.

Electronic delivery of public services in Bangladesh has not been effective as planned. There are issues regarding channels of communication, the competence of public officials, human and financial resources, and political will to support the agencies delivering public services.

The paper examines the arrangements, practices, and problems of delivery of public services in Bangladesh through e-service centers at the local levels to determine the progress and potentials of employing digital technology for addressing problems. It proposes the strategy for public service delivery by using digital technology in the country.