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The purpose of this paper is to decompose the inequities induced by the Nigerian health care financing sources and their effect on the income distribution. Inequities in health care financing sources are of immense policy concern particularly in developing countries such as Nigeria, where high-level income inequality exists, and the cost of medical care is generally financed out-of-pocket (OOP) due to limited access to health insurance.

The Duclos et al. decomposition model provided the theoretical framework for the study. Data were obtained from two waves of the Nigeria General Household Survey (GHS) panel, 2012–13 and 2015–16. The analysis covered 3,999 households in 2012–13 and 4,051 households in 2015–16. Two measures of health care financing: OOP payment and health insurance contribution (HIC) were used. The ability to pay measure was household consumption expenditure.

The major inequity issue induced by the OOP payments was vertical inequity. HICs created the problems of vertical inequity, horizontal inequity and reranking among households. Overall both health care financing options were associated with the worsening of income inequality both at the national and sectorial levels in the country. The operations of the NHIS need to be improved to ensuring improved health care coverage for the poor.

This paper fulfills an identified need to determine the income redistributive effects (REs) of the social health insurance (SHI) contribution at the national, urban and rural locations overtime.

Using real-time data from the University of Luxembourg’s COME-HERE nationally representative panel survey, covering more than 8,000 individuals across France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Sweden, the author investigates how income distributions and poverty rates have changed from January to September 2020. The author finds that poverty rates increased on average in all countries from January to May and partially recovered in September. The increase in poverty is heterogeneous across countries, with Italy being the most affected and France the least; within countries, COVID-19 contributed to exacerbating poverty differences across regions in Italy and Spain. With a set of poverty measures from the Foster–Greer–Thorbecke family, the author then explores the role of individual characteristics in shaping different poverty profiles across countries. Results suggest that poverty increased disproportionately more for young individuals, women, and respondents who had a job in January 2020 – with different intensities across countries.

The neo-Kaleckian model follows the ideas of Marx, Keynes and Kalecki, that investment is a key influencing factor in the dynamics of the capitalist mode of production. Through the discussion of different forms of investment decision function, this paper constructs the analysis framework of wage-led and profit-led economic growth regimes.

The model has become an important theoretical paradigm for current Western heterodox economists regarding the research on the impact of functional income distribution on economic growth, and it has a very large impact on both theoretical and empirical research. Starting from Marx's reproduction theory, this article discusses the theoretical shortcomings of the neo-Kaleckian growth regime model.

This paper mainly focuses on three aspects: (1) the ideological legacy of “Smith's Dogma”; (2) neglecting the restrictions on income distribution from the organic composition of capital and the surplus value rate; (3) technological progress and the formation of a new long economic wave.

The authors believe that the neo-Kaleckian model unilaterally emphasizes the demand-side factors in the economy and, unconsciously or not, ignores the role of the supply-side, which makes it encounter certain limitations in explaining long-term growth. Even if some empirical conclusions are employed to bridge functional income distribution and technological progress, there is still a lack of a theoretical basis for accurately describing long-term economic changes using this model. In order to better promote high-quality economic development and accelerate the formation of a new pattern of economic development in which the domestic large-scale cycle is the mainstay and the domestic and international double cycles promote each other, the authors need to adopt a policy combination with the supply-side as the main and the demand-side as the supplement, and to work from both sides.

Explains how and why the household should, and could, be an object of analysis for a new social accounting. It shows that the household has been neglected in national income accounting, which generally tends to represent it as a black box. It also shows how the data from national income accounting can be reworked to demonstrate the importance of the household at macro and meso levels. The reworking shows that 84 per cent of GDP passes through the household just as, at the meso level, there are important differences between households in how they pool, spend and save income.

In the process of reform, although every landmark theoretical breakthrough is marked by the speech of the highest leadership of the Communist Party of China (CPC) or the decision of the CPC National Congress, each breakthrough is attributable to the theoretical contribution made by the academia of political economy. Notably, these theoretical breakthroughs invariably embrace innovations in the discourse system of political economy. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

The innovations and breakthroughs thereof have led to the political economy of socialism with Chinese characteristics.

The success of China’s economy highlights the superiority of the socialist economic system and development path with Chinese characteristics.

These major breakthroughs are accompanied by breakthroughs in relevant theories, which constitute a synthesis of a series of major theoretical innovations in political economics.

At present, the Chinese economy has entered the “new normal” phase with the transformation of development stages from the low-income to the middle-income ones. Accordingly, there appear a series of innovations in development theories. Innovations involve creative destructions. Therefore, innovative development theories at the present stage either deny the prevailing principles of development economics, or deny the theories that once effectively guided development at the low-income stage, or even sublate some of the development polices which were propelled and proved effective at the beginning of the reform and opening-up. The fundamental reason is that, as the development stages evolve, there occur new development tasks, new periodical characteristics and new laws of development. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Any development theory from abroad will find it difficult to correctly guide and clarify development problems in a socialist country, such as the huge population and the extreme imbalance between the urban and the rural and among regional developments.

In conclusion, China, as a large world economy, has made innovations in its economic development theory, which indicates that it intends to perfect itself rather than seek hegemony. As the world’s second largest economy, China should adapt to the transformation and further free people’s minds instead of adhering to the old patterns of thinking. It should think over the path of development for a great world economy from the historical starting point of a large world economy and find development strategies to transform itself from a large economy to a great economy, so as to realize the dream of the Chinese nation to build a powerful country.

Only political economy studies both the relations of production and the productive forces, and only a theory combining both can correctly guide China’s economic development, which especially needs to be promoted by taking advantage of socialist economic system. Therefore, the first and foremost principle for a socialist political economy with Chinese characteristics is to insist on liberating and developing productive forces.

Points out that differences in the background of the working population, are often made responsible for the observed inequality of income distribution. Explores whether the observed distribution in incomes in countries such as the Federal Republic of Germany (West and East), Great Britain, Sweden, the United States and Brazil could not be the result of a statistical distribution process in which households participate. Recalls the early work in statistical thermodynamics by Boltzmann and Maxwell, who studied the distribution of energy among an ensemble of identical molecules, and which showed that not all molecules hold the same energy, but rather that the distribution has an exponential fall‐off character, with most molecules being in the lower energy bracket. Adapts the Maxwell‐Boltzmann distribution to incomes, and transforms these distributions into well‐known Lorenz graphs, and obtains a perfect match for each examined country. Suggests that, as the distributions can be directly related to their corresponding statistical weights, and as their logarithms are proportional to entropy in statistical thermodynamics, it could be shown that the unequal income distribution has a higher entropy, and therefore is more stable than the corresponding low entropy distribution resulting from Boulding′s principle of equal advantage where all households earn the same income. Supposes that neither of the two extreme stand‐points to explain the inequality of incomes can lead to a totally satisfactory explanation. Proposes that evolutionary strategies may be an interesting lead to follow up in more detail.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of income inequality on cooperative propensities, and thus the ability of individuals to resolve collective action dilemmas.

The paper presents a meta-study of 32 developing country lab experiments correlating cooperative behaviour with prevailing Gini coefficients. Furthermore, the paper conducts standard dictator- and public goods game (PGG) experiments with culturally and demographically similar subject pools in two West African countries characterized by high and persistent variation in national income inequality.

The meta-study findings of a significant negative relationship between income inequality and contribution levels in the PGG are corroborated by the own laboratory experimental findings that participants in more unequal Nigeria are significantly less altruistic and exhibit significantly lower propensities to cooperate than their more egalitarian Ghanaian counterparts. Moreover, the latter findings are robust when controlling for personal income levels.

The findings have nontrivial implications for collective action theorists and practitioners seeking to elicit tacit cooperation in developing countries.

The major contributions of this paper are the novel meta-analysis and the first attempt to examine the influence of personal income levels on cooperative behaviour in societies characterized by differential levels of income inequality.

This chapter argues that the Marxian theory of exploitation underlies the concepts of surplus and deficit industries that appear in Sraffa’s (1960) Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities. This is seen from archival research of the unpublished papers of Piero Sraffa housed at the Wren Library, Trinity College, University of Cambridge. There it is shown that the origin of these concepts lies in the Marxian theory of exploitation that Sraffa developed regarding the notion of the ‘pool of profits’ the Italian economist utilized over a 14-year period from 1942 to 1956. The chapter engages in an extensive textual study of the archival evidence and then presents a simple analytical model of these relations.