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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of financial development on the rural‐urban income inequality in India using annual data from 1965 to 2008.

The Ng‐Perron unit root test is utilised to check for the order of integration of the variables. The long run relation is examined by implementing the ARDL bounds testing approach to cointegration.

The results confirm a relation among the variables. Evidence suggest that financial development, economic growth and consumer prices aggravate rural‐urban income inequality in the long run.

The present study offers fresh insights to policy makers on crafting appropriate policies that reduce rural‐urban income inequality in India.

The contribution of this paper is lies in extending the literature in the context of India towards an extensively researched area of rural‐urban divide but in time series framework and utilization of a better approach of time series approach, i.e. ARDL. Specifically, to the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first empirical study to test poverty‐finance nexus using the basic principles of the GJ hypothesis and provide evidence of short‐ and long‐run dynamics on the postulated relation for India.

Africa is going through a youth bulge with more people under 25 than above 50 in all of its countries. Creating opportunities for the burgeoning number of youth is a challenge that cannot be solved only at the country level. Regional integration policies that expand the opportunity space by increasing the size of economies and markets will be critical. Also needed are regional policies that can support the development and enhancement of innovation systems including investment in science and technology education to speed up the creation of a cadre of young people that can lead the transformation of stages of production from dependencies on primary products and extraction. Policies and Programs that can modernize agriculture and support effective creation of value chains that enhance the value added from agriculture that can excite youth back to the rural areas would also be needed. This paper explores the challenges facing countries in Africa in relation to it’s demographic transition, investigating the type of policies that would be most effective to address the challenge. The subsets of policies at the regional level are given special attention due to their opportunity expanding nature. Concrete examples of what has potential from observed results in other regions of the world are provided.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the efforts of an ethnic Miao migrant worker association to recreate and engage with festivals both in the host society of the Pearl River Delta and back home in Southeastern Guizhou province of Southwest China. It analyzes how and under what conditions the disadvantaged migrant workers collectively demonstrate and assert their cultural identity in festival activities, rekindling and strengthening their ethnic consciousness.

Based on ethnographic field data, this study focuses on the connections between migrant workers’ lives in modern host societies and their traditional culture back home. Special attention is paid to the temporal dynamics of migrant workers’ cultural identity and socio-economic development.

The leaders of the Miao migrants’ association created network linkages to channel the flow of labor, capital and culture between the host society and the migrants’ hometown, and made efforts to secure institutional embeddedness at both ends of the flow. Their use of festivals and related heritage as cultural capital has facilitated the cultivation of network linkages and institutional embeddedness for economic advancement and overcoming ethnic prejudices and institutional disadvantages.

By illustrating how the economic development has been imbricated with culture, this research enhances understanding about the role of network linkage and institutional embeddedness in the flow of labor, capital and culture between host society and home place of migrant communities.

This research seeks to investigate the relationship between structure and context in the manufacturing sector in the Sudan, as one of the developing countries. Hence, the “universality” of the relationship between context and structure could be tested by conducting cross‐cultural comparisons.

In this study cross‐sectional research strategy is adopted in which 30 manufacturing firms are investigated. Hickson et al. (1969) measures were employed to operationalize the concepts of structure and context. Correlation analysis is used to test the significance of the relationship between the two variables.

This study could be categorized as a new advocate to the Aston Group's size imperative rationale. Also the findings suggest that the impact of the national cultures on the structuring of organizations is not as strong as perceived by some researchers.

The implication of this research is that researchers and practitioners should overemphasize the impact of national culture on organizations’ structures and processes.

The value of the research can be attributed to the scarcity of evidences from developing countries as far as the relationship between context and structure is concerned.

Explains that although scholars acquainted with better methods and newer theories have explored the influences on workers’ decision to join or not to join the unions, little systematic research has been conducted on this subject in relation to Indian industrial workers. Presents a study based on data collected from five large Indian organizations. Reveals that, compared with other variables, age, skill, upbringing, background, wage structure, constraints of wedlock, political involvement, job dissatisfaction, satisfaction with supervisory behaviour, aspiration for promotion, and desire to participate in decision making help shape the pro‐union or anti‐union attitude of workers. While economic and protective motives appeal much to workers in joining unions, dissatisfaction with the unions and their leaders, and fear of victimization, keep a large number of non‐members away from unions. Provides a review of research on this issue and attempts to distil, from the study results, insights and implications of practical relevance to unions, union leaders and management. Puts forth future research priorities in the area.

Regional and rural Australians have long appreciated the problem of demographics in politics particularly as they relate to the electoral process and its related party system. All Australians understand the nexus between voting, the formation of governments and the construction of public policy – including, of course, policies that come under the rubric of ‘law and order’. Regional and rural voters have worried about the scope for their policy demands to be overwhelmed by the concerns of urban communities that, in most Australian states, constitutes what might be thought of as a majority. This chapter seeks to shine light on the notions of a rural-urban divide, its consequences for the party system and its impact on policy formation. It will highlight some important demographic differences between the metropolis and the regions and note the propensity for voter volatility to manifest itself in party choices especially where multi-member proportional representation occurs. The success of independents and minor parties may be an indication of regional voter disillusion with the traditional political parties of rural Australia, the Liberal and National parties.

Territorial food markets and governance have emerged as a key mechanism for the design and implementation new food systems and policies aimed at sustainable cities. However, the many existing policies tend to overlook the way food markets and supply strategies work. This chapter analyses governance in traditional agri-food markets in Brazil, aiming to demonstrate how, in different contexts, the economic interactions between actors are embedded in a set of social institutions (cultural values), which define modes of governance, participation in the markets and can be potential to fostering new (sustainable) rural-urban relations. These institutions challenge and compete with formal regulatory requirements imposed by the public authorities, which often disrupt and/or inhibit the development of local and traditional production and consumption practices, posing obstacles to the fostering rural-urban relations and the construction of solid local policies for food supply. Empirical data refer to three traditional Brazilian markets: the Feira do Pequeno Produtor in Passo Fundo, located in the South of Brazil, the Feira Central de Campina Grande and the Feira de Caruaru, both located in the Northeast of the country. The results point to the necessity and centrality to cities food supply policies recognise, encourage and institutionalise these markets traditional institutions in order to overcome supermarketisation and consolidate sustainable food systems. These process could be able to remove traditional markets from marginalise, promoting not only their survival, but their growth and consolidation as a source of decent work, healthy food and new sustainable rural-urban relationships.

This chapter is intended to investigate the ramifications of foreign trade regime on the technological front in relation with the impact of between trade liberalization on the process of skill formation in dual economy setting and thereby, the wage dynamics facing the skilled and unskilled labor. The ideation toward this end is owed to the seminal literature concerning the connection between free trade and economic dualism, general and the implication of such nexus on skilling process, in particular. Hence, based on the above dispensation, it may be possible to analyze the consequence of free trade on knowledge economy (wherein, the knowledge essentially purports to technical skill, proficiency in various aspects of work and perhaps, to some extent, the case of innovation) and additionally, what it impinges on welfare and economic development for less developed countries. The theoretical underpinning of the baseline model is based basically on the dualistic structure of the economy with regional specifications of the factors. In this framework, it has been examined that under the condition liberal trade policy in a less developed country, featured by reduced tariff, how it makes up for the formation of knowledge capital in the presence of technology-intensive export sector employed skilled and, in such process, if wage inequality gets exacerbated or otherwise. This is further drawn to investigating the implicit change in the propensity of rural–urban migration of unskilled labor, consequent upon the escalation openness to foreign trade; in what holds out significantly as regards the persistence of economic dualism, in general and balanced growth phenomenon between urban and rural sectors, in particular.

The purpose of this study is to examine how renewable energy consumption moderates the relationship between inequality and carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions for Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS). The nexus between energy use and geopolitical tensions has also been explored.

This study has used distinctive data sets from 1990 to 2018 to explore the interconnections on emission, energy use, inequality and geopolitics. To do away with the difficulties related to heterogeneity and cross-sectional dependence (CD), this paper uses recent estimation methods that are robust to panel heterogeneity and CD.

The results of the panel augmented mean group (AMG) estimation and common correlated effects mean group (CCEMG) estimation verify the environmental Kuznets curve. The findings show that a 1% rise in Gini inequality leads to a 0.24% rise in the CO₂ emission (AMG) method and a 0.17% rise in emissions CCEMG (method). As far as the moderating impact of renewable energy upon Gini measure of inequality is concerned, it is −0.10 AMG and CCEMG methods of estimation, respectively. However, the moderating impact of renewable energy on the geopolitical index leads to a mitigating impact on CO₂ emissions, 0.55% decline in AMG method.

This research makes a distinctive contribution by investigating for the first time to the best of the authors’ knowledge the main pillars of sustainable ecological development in the context of the BRICS nations.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between financial development and rural-urban income inequality (INQ) in South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) countries using panel data from 1986-2012.

The stationarity properties are checked by the LLC and IPS panel unit root tests. The paper applied the Pedroni’s panel co-integration test to examine the existence of the long-run relationship and coefficients of co-integration are examined by fully modified ordinary least squares. The short-term and long-run causality is examined by panel Granger causality.

The results of Pedroni co-integration test indicate that there exists a long-run relationship among the variables. The findings suggest that financial development increases rural-urban inequality whereas trade openness reduces rural-urban inequality. The empirical results of panel Granger causality indicate evidence of short-run causality confirms that economic growth and financial development causes rural-urban INQ.

The present study recommends for appropriate economic and financial reforms focusing on financial inclusion to reduce rural-urban INQ in SAARC countries. Financial policies geared toward agriculture and rural population should be adopted to reduce the prevailing rural-urban INQ in SAARC region.

Till date, there is hardly any study exploring the causal relationship between financial development and rural-urban INQ for SAARC countries by using panel co-integration and causality techniques. So the contribution of the paper is to fill these research gaps in the literature.