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The COVID-19 pandemic has forced countries to consider how to reach vulnerable communities with extended outreach services to improve vaccination uptake. The authors created an optimization model to align with decision-makers' objective to maximize immunization coverage within constrained budgets and deploy resources considering empirical data and endogenous demand.

A mixed integer program (MIP) determines the location of outreach sites and the resource deployment across health centers and outreach sites. The authors validated the model and evaluated the approach in consultation with UNICEF using a case study from The Gambia.

Results in The Gambia showed that by opening new outreach sites and optimizing resource allocation and scheduling, the Ministry of Health could increase immunization coverage from 91.0 to 97.1% under the same budget. Case study solutions informed managerial insights to drive gains in vaccine coverage even without the application of sophisticated tools.

The research extended resource constrained LMIC vaccine distribution modeling literature in two ways: first, endogenous calculation of demand as a function of distance to health facility location enabled the effective design of the vaccine network around convenience to the community and second, the model's resource bundle concept more accurately and flexibly represented complex requirements and costs for specific resources, which facilitated buy-in from stakeholders responsible for managing health budgets. The paper also demonstrated how to leverage empirical research and spatial analysis of publicly available demographic and geographic data to effectively represent important contextual factors.

This paper aims to theoretically find out whether investments could close the formal-informal wage gap in India.

The paper builds a general equilibrium model of a developing economy with a large informal sector and a capital-intensive formal sector with sector-specific capital and incorporates endogenous demand.

With homothetic preferences, a small initial wage premium and elastic relative demand, investment in the formal sector is likely to close the wage gap, but the gap persists with non-homothetic preferences. However, investment in the informal sector is unlikely to close the wage gap with either type of preferences.

Though labour market distortions in developing economies leading to a formal-informal wage gap are well-documented in the development literature, little attention has been given to the question of whether such a gap would close over time.

The recent COVID-19 has obliged governments to enact large-scale policies to contain it. A topic of economic debate is the quantification of the impact that these policies can create in the economy, with the aim of activating regulatory mechanisms to minimize this impact. In this vein, this study aims to propose a quantification of the effects of the Italian government policy that blocks nonessential production activities.

The authors use a multisectoral extended inoperability model on the social accounting matrix of Italy. The analysis identifies the pandemic’s impact on outputs, endogenous demands, value-added and disposable incomes of institutional sectors.

The construction and real estate sectors revealed a significant contraction followed by the retail trade and hotel and catering services sectors. The output contraction further impacts the value-added generation, disposable income and final demand components.

The current pandemic is alleged to have a greater impact than the epidemics of the past century, considering the present dimension of the world economy and the increasing interconnections between industries and institutions. In this scenario, it is challenging to safeguard not only human health and life but also the economy. Hence, there is a need to establish a trade-off between health and economics; and in this regard, the current study empirically quantifies the impact of health measures on the economy. The findings of this study help identify the sectors that are more prone to disaster effects and also present the structure of income circular flow in the Italian economy.

This article deals with how to test for and evaluate interdependence among control practices in a management control system using structural equation modeling. Empirical research on the levers of control (LOC) framework is used as an example. In LOC research, a path model approach to interdependence has been developed. The appropriateness of this approach is evaluated, developed, and compared with the correlation of residuals approach (seemingly unrelated regression) implemented in the wider complementarity literature. Empirical examples of the different models are shown and compared by using a data set on LOC of 120 SBUs in Sweden. The empirical results show that modeling interdependence among control practices in a management control system as non-recursive (bi-directional) paths or as residual correlations evidently affects the conclusions drawn about interdependence in terms of both presence and magnitude. The two models imply different views on how to conceptualize interdependence and are not statistically and empirically comparable. If using non-recursive path models, several model specification issues appear. To be able to identify such models, this needs to be carefully considered in the theory and research design prior to data collection.

This chapter is an introduction to the English version of Karl Kautsky’s essay “Theories of Crises,” which in turn is a review of Michael von Tugan-Baranowsky, Studien zur Theorie und Geschichte der Handelskrisen in England (Studies on the Theory and History of Commercial Crises in England), published in 1901. The chapter contextualizes Kautsky’s essay in the framework of the ongoing revisionist controversy within the Social Democratic Party of Germany and the Second International, and well as of the debate between Marxists and Populists in Russia.

This paper presents a systematic literature review, including content and bibliometric analyses, of the impact of blockchain technology (BT) in auditing, to identify trends, research areas and construct an agenda for future research.

The authors include studies from 2010 to 2020 in their structured literature review (SLR), using accounting journals on the Scopus database, which yielded 40 articles with blockchain and auditing at its core.

One of the contributions of the authors’ analyses is to group the prior research, and therefore also the agenda for future research, into three main research areas: (1) Blockchain as a tool for auditing professionals to improve business information systems to save time and prevent fraud; (2) Smart contracts enabling Audit 4.0 efficiency, reporting, disclosure and transparency; (3) Cryptocurrency and initial coin offerings (ICOs) as a springboard for corporate governance and new venture financing. The authors’ findings have several important implications for practice and theory.

The results of this study emphasise that (1) the disruption of blockchain in auditing is in a nascent phase and there is a need for compelling empirical studies and potential for the involvement of practitioners; (2) there may be a need to reconsider audit procedures especially suited for digitalisation and BT adoption; (3) standards, guidelines and training are required to pivot towards and confront the challenge BT will represent for auditing; and (4) there are two sides to the BT coin for auditing, enthusiasm about the potential and risk upon implementation. These practical implications can also be seen as a template for future research in a quest to align theory and practice.

The authors’ SLR facilitates the identification of research areas and implications, forming a useful baseline for practitioners, professionals and academics, as they draft the state of the art on the disruption of blockchain in auditing, highlighting how BT is changing auditing activities and traditions.

Examines the theory of regional equilibria in the presence of endogenous migration, where net migration flows are determined by real consumption wage and unemployment‐rate differentials. Provides a theoretical analysis of market clearing and steady state concepts of equilibrium and examines the impact on local demand of government expenditure. Concludes that a natural rate input‐output model applies, but that the system takes a long time to return to the equilibrium.

This paper explores the pattern of technical change in the Korean economy from 1970 to 2013 and investigates its determinants. We use the Classical growth-distribution schedule to show that the labor-saving and capital-using pattern has predominated. For the rationale behind this Marx-biased technical change, we focus on the relationship between technical change and real wage growth via the evolution of labor and capital productivity, and verify the historical direction of technical change against the rise and fall of the working class. Furthermore, we find that the deviation during the post-crisis period from the long-run trend of Marx-biased technical change is not attributable to the vitality of new technological innovations, but rather the reflection of class dynamics over extracting productivity under weaker capital deepening. The results suggest that the recent deterioration of labor share and labor unions in Korea is closely associated with low incentive for technological progress, which contributes to prolonged stagnation.

In this chapter, we describe the formal features of recent reforms in Thailand's public administration. While it remains premature to attempt definitive assessments of the impact of those reforms, we deduce grounds for concern. In particular, we suggest that successful public management reforms must rest on a reasonable degree of congruence between the reforms' implicit assumptions on the one hand and Thai political and social conditions on the other. And we suggest that such a match is not evident in the case of Thailand's most recent administrative reforms.