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This article draws upon our perspective as academic-practitioners working in the fields of food insecurity, food systems, and inequality to comment, in the early stages of the pandemic and associated lockdown, on the empirical and ethical implications of COVID-19 for socio-economic inequalities in access to food in the UK. The COVID-19 pandemic has sharpened the profound insecurity of large segments of the UK population, an insecurity itself the product of a decade of “austerity” policies. Increased unemployment, reduced hours, and enforced self-isolation for multiple vulnerable groups is likely to lead to an increase in UK food insecurity, exacerbating diet-related health inequalities. The social and economic crisis associated with the pandemic has exposed the fragility of the system of food charity which, at present, is a key response to growing poverty. A vulnerable food system, with just-in-time supply chains, has been challenged by stockpiling. Resultant food supply issues at food banks, alongside rapidly increasing demand and reduced volunteer numbers, has undermined many food charities, especially independent food banks. In the light of this analysis, we make a series of recommendations. We call for an immediate end to the five week wait for Universal Credit and cash grants for low income households. We ask central and local government to recognise that many food aid providers are already at capacity and unable to adopt additional responsibilities. The government's – significant – response to the economic crisis associated with COVID-19 has underscored a key principle: it is the government's responsibility to protect population health, to guarantee household incomes, and to safeguard the economy. Millions of households were in poverty before the pandemic, and millions more will be so unless the government continues to protect household incomes through policy change.

There is growing interest around the world in more effectively linking public payments to the provision of public goods from agriculture. However, published evidence syntheses suggest mixed, weak or uncertain evidence for many agri-environment scheme options. To inform any future “public money for public goods” based policy, further synthesis work is needed to assess the evidence-base for the full range of interventions currently funded under agri-environment schemes. Further empirical research and trials should then focus on interventions for which there is mixed or limited evidence. Furthermore, to ensure the data collected is comparable and can be synthesised effectively, it is necessary to reach agreement on essential variables and methods that can be prioritised by those conducting research and monitoring. Future policy could then prioritise public money for the public goods that can most reliably be delivered, offering better value for taxpayers and improving the provision of ecosystem services from agricultural landscapes.

This integrated care study seeks to highlight how voluntary sector “wellbeing co-ordinators” co-located in a horizontally and vertically integrated, multidisciplinary community hub within one locality of an Integrated Care Organisation contribute to complex, person-centred, co-ordinated care.

This is a naturalistic, mixed method and mixed data study. It is complementing a before-and-after study with a sub-group analysis of people receiving input from the wider hub (including Wellbeing Co-ordination and Enhanced Intermediate Care), qualitative case studies, interviews, and observations co-produced with embedded researchers-in-residence.

The cross-case analysis uses trajectories and outcome patterns across six client groups to illustrate the bio-psycho-social complexity of each group across the life course, corresponding with the range of inputs offered by the hub.

To consider the effectiveness and mechanisms of complex system-wide interventions operating at horizontal and vertical interfaces and researching this applying co-produced, embedded, naturalistic and mixed methods approaches.

How a bio-psycho-social approach by a wellbeing co-ordinator can contribute to improved person reported outcomes from a range of preventive, rehabilitation, palliative care and bereavement services in the community.

To combine knowledge about individuals held in the community to align the respective inputs, and expectations about outcomes while considering networked pathways based on functional status, above diagnostic pathways, and along a life-continuum.

The hub as a whole seems to (1) Enhance engagement through relationship, trust and activation, (2) Exchanging knowledge to co-create a shared bio-psycho-social understanding of each individual’s situation and goals, (3) Personalising care planning by utilising the range of available resources to ensure needs are met, and (4) Enhancing co-ordination and ongoing care through multi-disciplinary working between practitioners, across teams and sectors.

This study aims to propose a non-linear model to describe the effect of macroeconomic shocks on delinquency rates of three kinds of bank loans. Indeed, a wealth of literature has recognized significant evidence of the linkage between macro conditions and credit vulnerability, perceiving the importance of the high amount of bad loans for economic stagnation and financial vulnerability.

Generally, this linkage was represented by linear relationships, but the strong dependence of bank loan default on the economic cycle, subject to changes in regime, could suggest non-linear models as more appropriate. Indeed, macroeconomic variables affect the performance of bank’s portfolio loan, but such a relationship is subject to changes disturbing the stability of parameters along the time. This study is an attempt to model three different kinds of bank loan defaults and to forecast them in the case of the USA, detecting non-linear and asymmetric behaviors by the adoption of a Markov-switching (MS) approach.

Comparing it with the classical linear model, the authors identify evidence for the presence of regimes and asymmetries, changing in correspondence of the recession periods during the span of 1987–2017.

The data are at a quarterly frequency, and more observations and more extended research periods could ameliorate the MS technique.

The good forecasting performance of this model could be applied by authorities to fine-tune their policies and deal with different types of loans and to diversify strategies during the different economic trends. In addition, bank management can refer to the performance of macroeconomic conditions to predict the performance of their bad loans.

The authors show a clear outperformance of the MS model concerning the linear one.