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This study aims to examine the impact of fiscal space and governance quality on inclusive growth in African countries.

In total, 28 African countries were analyzed from 2000 to 2020 using the generalized method of moment regression method. An inclusive growth index was developed using the principal component analysis (PCA) method. The PCA-derived index incorporates factors such as poverty, income inequality, economic participation and per capita income.

The main findings suggest that fiscal space availability (de facto fiscal space and fiscal balance) promotes inclusive growth. The study also showed that lagged inclusive growth, digitalization and governance indicators positively influence inclusive growth. The study concludes that fiscal space availability fosters inclusive growth, but this effect is mediated by governance quality in Africa.

Several studies examined the role of fiscal policy on inclusive growth. However, it is crucial to assess the fiscal space, that is, the financial capacity of the government to implement its fiscal policy without harming its financial stability. This paper, therefore, contributes to the existing literature by using de facto fiscal space indicator to comprehend fiscal dynamics contributing to inclusive growth. In addition, the paper uniquely constructs an inclusive growth index by including poverty severity, which considers both the incidence and depth of poverty and inequality in society.

This study aims to understand how perceived desirability and perceived feasibility influence Portuguese higher education students' social entrepreneurial intention and general entrepreneurial intention and explore how gender attitudes can affect these relationships.

This study's sample comprises 391 participants. The hypotheses formulated in the research model were tested through structural equation modelling, using the bootstrapping method to perform decomposition tests and multigroup analyses to assess the effect of gender on perceived desirability, perceived feasibility and social and general entrepreneurial intention.

The sample data reveal that women have a greater social entrepreneurial intention, and men have a greater general entrepreneurial intention. The results regarding the research model reveal that perceived desirability positively influences social and general entrepreneurial intention, with stronger relationships for men than for women. However, perceived feasibility positively influences overall entrepreneurial intention but is insignificant in explaining social entrepreneurial intention. When the differences between genders are analysed, the perceived feasibility by women is significant and positively influences the social entrepreneurial intention, not being significant when men are considered. Contrary to previous studies about higher education students, men have a higher perceived desirability in both general and social entrepreneurial intentions, while women have a stronger perceived feasibility in both general and social entrepreneurial intentions.

This paper contributes to the development of the social entrepreneurship literature, demonstrating that social entrepreneurial intention can be influenced by gender. The results show the importance of considering the spatial and organisational context in examining the relationships between perceived desirability/perceived feasibility and social entrepreneurial intentions of men and women.

The purpose of this research is to identify novel ways of tackling health inequalities of underserved populations. It explores the opportunities presented by the changes in health and social care legislation to employ historically underused services, such as police custody healthcare providers, in addressing health inequalities.

This research analyses the policy approaches to tackling health inequalities in the UK in the past 40 years with an emphasis on those experienced by the people detained in English police custodies. It analyses the current model of healthcare in police custody and proposes a novel integrated model of care and joint commissioning opportunities in funding it.

Policies to tackle health inequalities have largely failed, as they became entrenched. But recent changes in the health and social care legislation in England offer opportunities to address them by employing historically underused healthcare services, such as those operating in police custodies.

The research does not touch upon ethical considerations related to the patient privacy aspect of integrated care. Interventions by and interactions with police custody healthcare providers would be visible to all professionals with access to the patient’s health record. As with all novel interventions or innovative models of care, the effectiveness of such clinical interventions remains to be established by further research. It opens a new line of research on quality improvement through integration of care and explores understudied aspects of joint commissioning of integrated care.

It offers health commissioners and public health leaders the opportunity to employ police custody healthcare services in reaching their population health management objectives and meeting their health inequalities objectives at local level. It also gives police and crime commissioners the opportunity to address the health drivers of criminal behaviour that overlap with health inequalities. It offers funding opportunities presented by jointly commissioning services at lower costs to both police and health commissioners alike. It improves the health outcomes of historically underserved populations by facilitating access to health and social care services and facilities.

Reducing health inequalities and disparities in health outcomes can decrease the costs of the healthcare services over the long term and might contribute to reducing criminality by addressing inequities and some health drivers of criminal behaviour.

The paper explores understudied opportunities offered by the recent changes in health and social care legislation in England and includes underused resources to tackle health inequalities.

This paper examines the US opera sector as a means for interrogating how varying forms of non-standard work shape gender inequality in the creative industries.

The authors draw on 16 seasons of opera production data from Operabase.com to conduct a gender-based exploratory data analysis of the key creative roles of conductor, director and designers, as well as the hiring networks through which teams are formed, at the 11 largest opera companies in the United States.

The authors find that women, as a group, experienced gender-based disadvantage across the key creative roles of opera production, but particularly in the artistic leadership roles of conductor and director. The authors also find that women's exclusion in the field is being further perpetuated by the sector's non-standard and overlapping employment structures, which impacts women practitioners' professional visibility and career opportunities.

The study can help organizations implement strategic hiring practices that acknowledge the relationship between gender inequality and varying forms of non-standard work with the aim of increasing women's representation.

This study work establishes the scale of gender inequality operating within a sector that has received minimal scholarly attention as a site of employment. The study analysis also offers important insight for the wider creative industries and highlights opportunities to redress gender inequality in other sectors where project-based work is prevalent.

This paper is part of the Special Issue series Improving Life on Planet Earth – A Call to Action for Service Research to Achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). This paper aims to provide the groundwork for Service Research Theme 2 – services that provide OPPORTUNITY for all humans. Service Research Theme 2 comprises SDG4, quality education; SDG5, gender equality; and SDG10, reduced inequalities and seeks to mobilize ServCollab’s aspirations to reduce human suffering, improve human well-being and enable well-becoming.

A scoping review appraising existing service research related to SDG4, SDG5 and SDG10 was conducted, establishing interlinkages, identifying patterns within each SDG and then assembling a research agenda for service researchers.

The scoping review identifies 18 patterns in service research (six patterns per SDG) pertaining to Service Research Theme 2. Common patterns among the SDG4, SDG5 and SDG10 included underrepresentation, consumer-centricity, the absence of explicit SDG linkages, the predominance of one theoretical anchor and the preference for quantitative studies, particularly surveys. Overall, the scoping review found that service research related to Service Research Theme 2 is patchy in that it is overdeveloped in some topics, methodologies and methods yet underdeveloped or silent in others.

The high-level research problem of Service Research Theme 2 is as follows: How have services provided OPPORTUNITY for all humans? This paper analyzes patterns in service research and, from these patterns, assembles a research agenda that sparks and guides further research.

The purpose of this study was to develop a scale that can be used to assess inequality at work based on gender, age and ethnicity that is grounded in Acker’s (2006) inequality regimes.

The authors used three representative samples (total N = 1,806) of Swedish teachers, nurses and social workers to develop and validate the scale. The validation process included the assessment of content validity, confirmatory factor analysis for factorial validity, internal consistency and associations with theoretically warranted outcomes and related constructs to assess criterion-related validity and convergent validity.

The authors found evidence supporting the content, factorial, criterion-related and convergent validity of the InEquality in organisations Scale (InE-S). Furthermore, the scale demonstrated high internal consistency.

The newly developed scale InE-S may be used to further the understanding of how inequality at work influences employees. This study makes a contribution to the current literature by providing a scale that, for the first time, can test Acker’s hypotheses using quantitative methods to demonstrate the consequences of inequality at work.

This paper explores the effect of tourism (national and international) indicators on income inequality in a sample of 21 Asia Pacific economies.

This study uses panel data set from 1995 to 2020 and employs panel autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) method for the empirical investigation.

The empirical findings from the panel ARDL models suggest that all of the considered tourism indicators have significant negative impacts on income inequalities. The results remain consistent with alternative indicators and methods.

The findings of this study will be critical for the policymakers to take effective measures to reduce the income inequality. Such measures could include promoting tourism in general, focusing on attracting international tourists or domestic tourists, and putting more weight on developing leisure or business tourism, which will boost the overall economic performance and alleviates inequalities in the society.

This is the first study to consider various forms of tourism indicators to see their impact on income inequality in the Asia–Pacific region, and offers important implications for the policy actions.

With the recognition that generating economic growth is not the same as sustaining it, the challenge to catch-up and growth literature is discerning between these processes. Recent research suggests that the decline in the frequency of “shrinking” episodes is more important for long-term development than higher growth rates. By using a framework centred around social capabilities, this study aims to investigate the effects of income inequality and poverty on economic shrinking frequency, as opposed to previous literature that has exclusively had a growth focus. The aim is to investigate how and why some societies might be more resilient to economic shrinking.

The research is a quantitative study, and the authors build a longitudinal data set including 23 developing countries throughout 42 years to test the paper’s purpose. This study uses country and period fixed-effects specifications as well as cross-sectional graphical representations to investigate the relationship between proxies of economic inclusivity and the frequency of shrinking episodes.

The authors demonstrate that while inclusive societies are more resilient to shrinking overall, it is changes in poverty levels, but not changes in income inequality, that appear to be correlated with economic shrinking frequency. Inequality, while still an important element to explain countries’ growth potential as an initial condition, does not seem to make the sample more resilient to shrinking. The authors conclude that the mechanisms in which poverty and inequality are correlated with the catch-up process must run through different channels. Ultimately, processes that explain growth may intersect but not always overlap with the ones that explain resilience to shrinking.

The need for inclusive growth in long-term development has been championed for decades, yet inclusion has seldom been explored from the shrinking perspective. Though poverty reduction is already an important mainstream political objective, this paper differentiates itself by providing an alternate viewpoint of why this is important. Income inequality could have more of an economic growth limiting effect, while poverty reduction could be required to build resilience to economic shrinking. Developing countries will need both growth and resilience to shrinking, to catch-up with higher-income economies, which policymakers might need to balance carefully.

This paper aims to explore synergies between feminist, first nations and queer theories and social, circular and climate entrepreneurship, to build a framework for supporting climate just entrepreneurship.

This paper draws on an extensive qualitative review of the literature on gender justice, equality, social entrepreneurship, the circular economy, climate entrepreneurship and climate action, as well as theorising feminist, first nations and queer approaches to climate action through entrepreneurship.

Whilst climate change is a “threat multiplier” for existing gender (and other) inequalities, gaps remain in engraining gender equality and gender justice principles in social, circular and climate entrepreneurship. Through analysing the literature for critical gaps and theorising at the intersection of climate entrepreneurship and feminist, first nations and queer theories, the authors advocate that a framework for climate just entrepreneurship could play a pivotal role in combining proactive climate action and gender equality measures through entrepreneurship. It could also be a significant step towards ensuring entrenched, systemic inequalities are not perpetuated in nascent and rapidly evolving fields such as the circular economy, social enterprise and climate entrepreneurship.

The literature on climate entrepreneurship is burgeoning, yet key entrepreneurial concepts lack an explicitly feminist or gender lens approach, even whilst being inextricably linked to effective climate action. This paper seeks to rectify this gap by promoting climate just entrepreneurship as a model for effective climate action.

This study aims to investigate how a French multinational enterprise (MNE) is developing employee stock ownership (ESO) in its subsidiaries in Peru and Mexico, both Latin American countries with deep social and economic inequalities.

This is a qualitative case study which conducted interviews with representatives of the French MNE and its subsidiaries in Peru and Mexico.

The employee stock purchase plans offered by the company to its employees support the achievement of the sustainable development goals (SDGs) 1, 8 and 10 in these countries.

The authors argue that MNEs could become flagships in the SDG achievement in emerging economies.

By contributing to better workplace outcomes and enhanced corporate performance, ESO is in line with SDG 8. ESO also fulfills SDGs 1 and 10 by allowing employees to build up savings and wealth, whose lack is the main source of inequality and poverty. Reciprocity and binary economics theories explain these relationships.