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Brazil’s regional inequality is an important topic due to the large and persistent differences in development between states and the high levels of inequality in the country. These variations in development can potentially render survey data inaccurate since the significance of capital income varies across the states. Besides, previous studies incorporating tax and national accounts data globally have mainly focused on measuring the income distribution at the country-level. This approach can limit the understanding of inequality, especially when considering large countries such as Brazil.

The methodology used to construct these estimates follows the guidelines of the Distributional National Accounts, whose core goal is to provide income distribution measures consistent with macroeconomic aggregates and harmonized across countries and time. The procedure has three main steps: first, it corrects the survey’s underrepresentation of top incomes using tax data. Then, it accounts for national income items not included in the survey or tax data, such as imputed rents and undistributed profits. Finally, it ensures that all components match the national income.

Compared to survey-based estimations, the results reveal a new angle on the state-level inequality. This study indicates that Amazonas, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo have a more concentrated income distribution. The top 1\% of earners in these states receives around 28\% of total pre-tax income, while the top 10\% receive nearly 60\%. On the other end, Amapá (AP), Acre (AC), Rondônia (RO) and Santa Catarina (SC) are the states where the income distribution is less concentrated. There were no significant changes in the income distribution across the states during the period analyzed.

This study combines survey, tax and national accounts data to construct new estimates of Brazil’s state-level income distribution from 2006 to 2019. Previous results only considered income captured in surveys, which usually misses a significant part of capital incomes. This limitation may bias comparisons as capital income has different importance across the states. The new estimates represent the income of top groups more accurately, account for the entire national income and enable to compare regional inequality levels consistently with other countries.

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.

The paper provides a detailed historical account of Douglass C. North's early intellectual contributions and analytical developments in pursuing a Grand Theory for why some countries are rich and others poor.

The author approaches the discussion using a theoretical and historical reconstruction based on published and unpublished materials.

The systematic, continuous and profound attempt to answer the Smithian social coordination problem shaped North's journey from being a young serious Marxist to becoming one of the founders of New Institutional Economics. In the process, he was converted in the early 1950s into a rigid neoclassical economist, being one of the leaders in promoting New Economic History. The success of the cliometric revolution exposed the frailties of the movement itself, namely, the limitations of neoclassical economic theory to explain economic growth and social change. Incorporating transaction costs, the institutional framework in which property rights and contracts are measured, defined and enforced assumes a prominent role in explaining economic performance.

In the early 1970s, North adopted a naive theory of institutions and property rights still grounded in neoclassical assumptions. Institutional and organizational analysis is modeled as a social maximizing efficient equilibrium outcome. However, the increasing tension between the neoclassical theoretical apparatus and its failure to account for contrasting political and institutional structures, diverging economic paths and social change propelled the modification of its assumptions and progressive conceptual innovation. In the later 1970s and early 1980s, North abandoned the efficiency view and gradually became more critical of the objective rationality postulate. In this intellectual movement, North's avant-garde research program contributed significantly to the creation of New Institutional Economics.

Despite large bodies of research related to the impacts of e-commerce on last-mile logistics and sustainability, there has been limited effort to evaluate urban freight using an equity lens. Therefore, this study proposes a modeling framework that enables researchers and planners to estimate the baseline equity performance of a major e-commerce platform and evaluate equity impacts of possible urban freight management strategies. The study also analyzes the sensitivity of various operational decisions to mitigate bias in the analysis.

The model adapts empirical methodologies from activity-based modeling, transport equity evaluation, and residential freight trip generation (RFTG) to estimate person- and household-level delivery demand and cargo van traffic exposure in 41 U.S. Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs).

Evaluating 12 measurements across varying population segments and spatial units, the study finds robust evidence for racial and socio-economic inequities in last-mile delivery for low-income and, especially, populations of color (POC). By the most conservative measurement, POC are exposed to roughly 35% more cargo van traffic than white populations on average, despite ordering less than half as many packages. The study explores the model’s utility by evaluating a simple scenario that finds marginal equity gains for urban freight management strategies that prioritize line-haul efficiency improvements over those improving intra-neighborhood circulations.

Presents a first effort in building a modeling framework for more equitable decision-making in last-mile delivery operations and broader city planning.

This research assesses the economic impact of biomass plant installations on Brazilian municipalities, focusing on (1) labor income, (2) sectoral labor income and (3) income inequality.

Municipal data from the Annual Social Information Report, the National Electric Energy Agency and the National Institute of Meteorology spanning 2002 to 2020 are utilized. The Synthetic Difference-in-Differences methodology is employed for empirical analysis, and robustness checks are conducted using the Doubly Robust Difference in Differences and the Double/Debiased Machine Learning methods.

The findings reveal that biomass plant installations lead to an average annual increase of approximately R$688.00 in formal workers' wages and reduce formal income inequality, with notable benefits observed for workers in the industry and agriculture sectors. The robustness tests support and validate the primary results, highlighting the positive implications of renewable energy integration on economic development in the studied municipalities.

This article represents a groundbreaking contribution to the existing literature as it pioneers the identification of the impact of biomass plant installation on formal employment income and local economic development in Brazil. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to uncover such effects. Moreover, the authors comprehensively examine sectoral implications and formal income inequality.

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 purpose of this study is shed light on the underlying forces behind entrepreneurship within a regional innovation system (RIS) in a remote rural region. The authors examine the following questions: Which are the main underlying forces behind the entrepreneurial process in a rural RIS characterized by traditionally low-tech, small-scale businesses? How can the development of a low-tech regional innovation system be conceptualized?

The design of the study is based on entrepreneurship theory. Data analysis followed practices used in phenomenography, a research approach used to analyse and identify commonalities and variations in populations' perceptions of a certain phenomenon. Data are composed using semi-structured interviews and a database composed of company information of all firms in the population.

A proactive mobilization of regional stakeholders and resources can be an important driving force behind the entrepreneurial process and generation of a rural RIS. Innovation can be generated within low-tech industries turning the rural context into an asset. An RIS in a remote rural context can be initiated and orchestrated by regional authorities, but knowledge brokering and orchestration can also be managed by networks of small-scale businesses brought together by mutual benefit and common interests.

Regional innovation systems theory is most often used to study high-tech industries. But by combining regional innovation systems with rural entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship context theory is a fruitful avenue to understand the role of rural entrepreneurship in regional development, even in remote and peripheral regions. Innovation does not need to entail high-tech international environments; it can appear as the result of efforts in low-tech industries in rural and remote environments. The authors’ findings need to be scrutinized; therefore, the authors call for more research on regional innovation systems in rural environments.

It is possible for regional authorities to orchestrate a development process through the actions of a strong regional agent but also by supporting the creation of networks of small businesses that are built on trust and common interests.

This study contributes to the literature with a new perspective to the study of entrepreneurship and of regional innovation systems. Entrepreneurship research with focus on rural contexts most often highlight limits to entrepreneurship and see entrepreneurship as “just running a business”. A perspective that starts from innovation and innovative behaviour, despite the rural context and embedded resources, helps to generate new knowledge that can enrich the understanding of entrepreneurship and also be the foundation for more precise business development policies in rural settings.

The aim of this paper is to analyse the spillover effects of microcredit on the economy of Ecuador, with a particular focus on its potential as a poverty alleviation mechanism.

To address our research questions, we take into account the distance between cantons (Ecuador’s own administrative distribution) by adopting a spatial autoregressive (SAR) model. To this end, a database will be constructed with macroeconomic information about the country, broken down by canton (administrative division of Ecuador), and in a 2019 cross section, with a total of 1,331 microcredit operations in all 221 of Ecuador’s cantons.

We find a positive effect of microcredit on these neighbouring regions in terms of wealth generation.

We acknowledge that this study is limited to Ecuadorian cantons. Nonetheless, it is crucial to emphasize that focussing on an under-represented developing country like Ecuador adds significant value to the research.

Facilitating access to microcredit is one of the main solutions to address the goals proposed in the sustainable development goals (SDGs).

Microcredit activity contributes to the creation of value and wealth in Ecuador, exerting a spillover effect in neighbouring areas that can generate positive multiplier effects and alleviate poverty. For all of the above reasons, our proposal for the country is to support and promote microcredit as one of the main solutions to address the goals proposed in the SDGs.

The novelty of this study lies in the use of spatial econometrics to observe the indirect effects of microcredit on the regions bordering the canton in which it was issued, thus examining the spatial effects of microcredit on wealth distribution.

This article aims to evaluate the entry and exit of companies from local productive structures, with a specific focus on the sectoral complexity of these activities and the complexity of these portfolios. The study focuses on empirically demonstrating the thesis that related economic diversification exacerbates the development gap between more and less complex regions.

The article uses indicators formulated by the economic complexity approach. They allow a relevant descriptive analysis of the economic diversification process in Brazilian micro-regions and provide the foundation for the econometric tests conducted. Through three distinct estimation strategies (OLS, logit, probit), the influence of complexity and relatedness on the entry and exit events of firms from local portfolios is tested.

In all estimated models, the stronger relationship between an activity and a portfolio significantly increases its probability of entering the productive structure and, at the same time, acts as a significant factor in preventing its exit. Furthermore, the results reveal that the complexity of a sector reduces the probability of its specialization in less complex regions while increasing it in more complex regions. On the other hand, sectoral complexity significantly increases the probability of a sector leaving less complex local structures but has no significant effect in highly complex regions.

Due to the data used, the indicators are calculated considering only formal job numbers. Additionally, the tests do not detect the influence of spatial issues. These limitations should be addressed by future research.

The article characterizes a prevailing process of uneven development among Brazilian regions and brings relevant implications, primarily for policymakers. Specifically, for less complex regions, policies should focus on creating opportunities to improve their diversification capabilities in complex sectors that are not too distant from their portfolios.

The article makes an original contribution by proposing an evaluation of regional diversification in Brazil with a focus on complexity, introducing a more detailed differentiation of regions based on their complexity levels and examining the impact of sectoral complexity on diversification patterns within each group.

This study examines the impact of competition and concentration on bank income smoothing in Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries.

The two-step system GMM method was used to analyse the impact of competition and concentration on bank income smoothing in 17 CEEs from 2004 to 2015.

Loan loss provisions (LLPs) are negatively related to bank competition and concentration. The authors find no evidence for income smoothing using LLPs in a high-competition or high-concentration environment.

A limitation of the study is that the analysis was restricted to commercial banks. The authors did not examine investment banks or microfinance banks in this study. Also, not having access to databases does not allow them to include recent years in the study.

CEE commercial banks will likely keep fewer provisions or engage in under-provisioning when they face intense competition, and this can expose them to credit risk, which may threaten their stability.

This study is the first to investigate the effect of concentration and competition on income smoothing among CEE banks.