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Personal remittance and ready-made garments (RMG) export incomes have emerged as the largest source of foreign income for Bangladesh's economy. The study investigates their impact on income inequality and gross domestic product (GDP) as a control variable, using time-series yearly data from 1983 to 2018.

It employs the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) estimation and the Toda-Yamamoto (T-Y) causality approach. The ARDL estimation outcomes confirm a long-run association among the above variables and validate the autoregressive characteristic of the model.

Personal remittances positively contribute to reducing the income gap among the people of the society and declining income inequality. In contrast, RMG export income and economic growth contribute to further income inequality. The T-Y causality analysis follows the ARDL estimation outcomes and authenticates their robustness. It reveals a feedback relationship between remittance inflow and the Gini coefficient, unidirectional causalities from RMG export income to income inequality and economic growth to income inequality.

The finding has important policy implications to limit the income gaps between low and high-income groups by channeling incremental income to the lower-income group people. The policymakers may facilitate further international migration to attract further remittances and may upgrade the minimum wage of the RMG workers.

The study is original. As far as the authors' knowledge goes, this is a maiden attempt to investigate the impact of personal remittances and RMG export income on income disparity in the case of Bangladesh.

The study aims to use individuals using the internet and fixed broadband subscriptions as a proxy for digitalization to empirically assess the effects of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), digitalization and their interaction on income inequality in developed and developing countries from 2002 to 2019.

The paper used the system general method of moments estimators for 30 developed and 35 developing countries.

FDI increases income inequality in developed countries but decreases it in developing countries, digitalization reduces income inequality in both groups and interaction term narrows income inequality in developed countries but widens it in developing countries.

The paper is the first to introduce digitalization into the FDI – income inequality relationship. Furthermore, it provides empirical evidence to show the difference in the role of digitalization in this relationship between developed and developing countries.

This study aims to analyse the consumption inequality between farm and non-farm households in rural Vietnam, using the data from the 2016 Vietnam household living standards survey.

The present paper applies the “recentered influence functions (RIF)” in “Oaxaca-Blinder (OB)” type decomposition as proposed by Firpo et al. (2018) to allow for the flexible distribution of the outcome variables and the non-randomness of non-farm employment that violates the classical linearity assumption.

Non-farm households have significantly higher per capita consumption expenditure than farm households for the entire distribution. The gap in expenditure is large at low percentiles and narrowing with higher percentiles. At 10th percentile, the gap is estimated at 27.1%, but it is decreasing to 11.1% at 90th percentile. Most of the gaps are explained by the differences in the observed characteristics between farm and non-farm households such as ethnicity, education, income, internal transmittances and household composition. Non-farm households are endowed with more productive factors that result in higher per capita consumption expenditure.

Gaps in ethnicity and education are found to be key predictors of the inequality in consumption expenditures between farm and non-farm households, then, government policies that are aimed at increasing access to non-farm employment and education for ethnic minorities and for rural poor households are pathways to improve rural household welfare and hence reduce inequality.

This paper aims to shed light on gender inequality in Nigeria exploring new available data. It makes a case for attention to women empowerment and likely economic outcomes. The general objective of the research work is to ascertain the direction of gender inequality and show the pattern of inequality. Also, sectoral trends are obtained by analyzing and examining income inequality in Nigeria.

The paper obtained data from the Living Standard Measurement Survey Wave 3, published 2017 with emphasis on the earnings that accrued to both male and female. The study employed the ordinary least square (OLS) method to show the relationship between the mean income and other parameters such as the sector of employment, marital status and education level. Theil’s entropy index was used to measure the within and between inequality that exist in the economy and across regions and sectors while adopting the overcrowding theory.

The result shows that gender inequality is more pronounced across the region, location and in some sectors of employment than the others. Geographical area has a higher effect on earnings disparity but is more pronounced among females. Also, the result showed that gender within inequality was high in the regions, education, location, and marital status while a higher level of education contributes to high wages for women. However, married women are more deprived.

This study has further revealed the need to bridge the gap gender inequality has caused in Nigeria, especially related to income, education and geographical location, with a focus on both opportunities and outcomes.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the changes in wealth and consumption inequality in Spain and estimate the consumption effects of housing and financial wealth.

The estimations are made using micro-data from the Spanish Survey of Household Finances (2002–2014) applying cross-section, panel and interquartile techniques.

The findings of this paper suggest that there was an increase in wealth inequality during the period under analysis and a reduction in consumption inequality. Also, the authors find a significant positive effect of wealth on consumer expenditure. Disaggregating by asset type, the value of the main residence is the category with the highest estimated effect on consumption, whereas the remaining types of assets, although still positive and generally significant, have more modest effects on consumption. However, the estimated coefficients and their significance can change substantially depending on the phase of the economic cycle and the position of the household in the income distribution.

These results provide new empirical evidence on the effects of household wealth changes on their consumption behavior, the differences depending on the household's position in the distribution and the fluctuations of these estimated coefficients throughout a period of profound economic upheavals.

This paper aims to evaluate the progressivity of health-care financing in Egypt by assessing all five financing sources individually and then combining them to analyze the equity of the whole financing system.

Lorenz dominance analysis and Kakwani progressivity index were applied on data from 2010/2011 Household Income, Expenditure, and Consumption Survey and the National Health Accounts 2011 using Stata to evaluate the progressivity of each source of health-care finance and the financing system overall.

The data show that Egypt’s health-care system, which is largely financed by out-of-pocket (OOP) payments, is slightly regressive, with an overall Kakwani index of −0.079. The overall regressive effect was the result of three regressive sources (OOP payments, an earmarked cigarette tax and direct taxes), one proportional finance source (social health insurance) and two slightly progressive sources (indirect taxes and private health insurance). This shows that the burden of financing health care falls more on the poor. These results signal the need for reform of health-care financing in Egypt to reduce dependence on OOP payments to achieve more equitable financing.

The paper seeks to augment the literature on health-care financing in Egypt by calculating specific progressivity estimates for all five sources of financing the Egyptian health-care system and analyzing the overall equity of this financing system. It will, therefore, provide a benchmark for monitoring the equity of finance in the Egyptian health-care system in future studies and allow one to assess the impact of implemented financing reforms in the future on the level of progressivity of health system financing.

This study aims to determine whether there is an effect of internal and public debt on income inequality in Kenya for the period 1970–2018.

The relationship is examined by using the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model by Pesaran et al. (2001) and Toda Yamamoto causality by Toda and Yamamoto (1995).

Our findings suggest that both internal and public debt harm inequality in Kenya in the long term. Furthermore, a one-way causality from internal debt to income inequality is also obtained while no causality relationship is found to exist between public debt and income inequality. Based on these findings, the study recommends that to reduce income inequality levels in Kenya, other methods of financing other than debt financing should be preferred because debt financing is not pro-poor.

This study is unique based on the fact that no previous paper has analysed the debt and inequality relationship in Kenya. To the best of our knowledge, this will be the first study to analyse the applicability of redistribution effect of debt in Kenya. The study is also different in that it provides separate analysis for public debt and internal debt on their effects on income inequality.

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.

This study provides the critical masses (thresholds) at which the positive incidence of finance and economic growth will be dampened by the negative effects of income inequality and poverty on energy consumption in Sub-Saharan Africa for policy direction.

The study employed the two steps systems GMM estimator for 41 countries in Africa from 2005–2020.

The study found that for finance to maintain a positive effect on energy consumption per capita, the critical thresholds for the income inequality indicators (Atkinson coefficient, Gini index and the Palma ratio) should not exceed 0.681, 0.582 and 5.991, respectively. Similarly, for economic growth (GDP per capita growth) to maintain a positive effect on energy consumption per capita, the critical thresholds for the income inequality indicators (Atkinson coefficient, Gini index and the Palma ratio) should not exceed 0.669, 0.568 and 6.110, respectively. On the poverty level in Sub-Saharan Africa, the study reports that the poverty headcount ratios (hc$144ppp2011, hc$186ppp2011 and hc$250ppp2005) should not exceed 7.342, 28.278 and 129.332, respectively for financial development to maintain a positive effect on energy consumption per capita. The study also confirms the positive nexus between access to finance (financial development) and energy consumption per capita, with the attending adverse effect on CO₂ emissions inescapable. The findings of this study make it evidently clear, for policy recommendation that finance is at the micro-foundation of economic growth, income inequality and poverty alleviation. However, a maximum threshold of income inequality and poverty headcount ratios as indicated in this study must be maintained to attain the full positive ramifications of financial development and economic growth on energy consumption in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The originality of this study is found in the computation of the threshold and net effects of poverty and income inequality in economic growth through the conditional and unconditional effects of finance.

This paper aims to focus on non-poor households that during the Great Recession experienced economic stress (ES). That is, whose economic comfort was reduced taking into account their previous living standards. The paper seeks to determine how the crisis has affected this extensive (and key) social group.

The analysis has been performed in a dynamic way. The non-poor households ES situation and its changes are studied throughout the period 2008-2016 by taking the four-year intervals provided by the longitudinal Spanish Living Conditions Survey. The authors discuss and select the circumstances to determine whether ES has occurred. To identify which variables determine the probability of suffering ES the authors use a standard logit model.

The main variable is the tenure status of the dwelling: property with a mortgage or rented multiply the risk of ES by up to 3.5 times. ES falls as the household’s work intensity increases. However, an improvement in the employment situation cannot be associated with a reduction in ES probability. The main socio-demographic variables behave as predicted: woman householder, grow in the number of household members and bad health increase the risk of ES, and the higher the level of education of the householder, the lower the risk.

There are very few studies regarding the people above the poverty line. Exploring and analyzing the factors determining the sensitivity of the largest part of the population to the crisis is very relevant, as the pace of the economic recovery depends largely on them.