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In this research, we explore the dynamics among measures of income inequality in the USA, male and female unemployment rates, and growth in government transfer using time series data.

This research adopts a macro-econometric approach to estimate a structural VAR model using time series data.

Our structural impulse responses found that growth in government transfer increases unemployment rates for both males and females. Female income inequality declines with increased government transfer. When the female income ratio rises, we observe that government transfer outlays fall over the forecast horizon. Variance decomposition finds that growth in government transfers is impacted by the male unemployment rate relatively more than the female unemployment rate. This research, therefore, suggests gender-specific government transfers to reduce income inequality. This, in effect, may reduce government transfer outlays over time.

This research, therefore, suggests gender-specific government transfers to reduce income inequality. This, in effect, may reduce government transfer outlays over time.

This research investigates the dynamics among income inequality, government transfer, and unemployment rates. There is a dearth of research articles that adopt a macro-econometric in this area.

The primary purpose of this study is to explore the effect of technical changes on provincial-level income inequality in Vietnam. The authors also investigate whether the quality of institutions and human capital level moderate this relationship.

This research applies the fixed-effect and random-effect models on a balanced panel data set of 63 Vietnamese provinces/cities from 2010 to 2020.

The study’s empirical results show that technical improvement has a nonlinear influence on income disparity in Vietnamese localities. When the local level of technology is limited, technological change can mitigate income disparity. However, as local technological levels increase, inequality tends to rise. Moreover, the study also reveals that the quality of a province’s institutions and the level of human resources are factors that moderate the correlation between technological change and income inequality. For provinces with better institutional quality and/or better human resources, inequality tends to decline under the impact of technological change.

The results of this study suggest that while encouraging technology advancement, localities should also ensure sustainable development, reduce income inequality and focus on improving institutional quality and human resources development.

There are increasing concerns about the impact of technical change on inequality in income distribution; however, empirical evidence on this relationship in developing countries remains scarce. This study is among the few attempts to examine this issue at the provincial level of a developing country considering the moderation effect of institutional quality and human capital level.

This research complements the extant literature on poverty and inequality by assessing the role of “virtual social networks” and “internet access in schools” in mitigating the incidence of inequality on poverty.

Using secondary data, the focus of the study is on developing countries and the empirical evidence is based on Tobit regressions.

The study shows that inequality unconditionally increases poverty while “virtual social networks” and “internet access in schools” negatively moderate the effect of inequality on poverty. An extended analysis provides thresholds of “virtual social networks” and “internet access in schools” at which, the unconditional positive effect of inequality on poverty is completely dampened and above which, negative incidences on poverty are apparent. These attendant information technology thresholds are below average levels in the sampled countries.

The study complements that extant literature by assessing the role of virtual social networks and internet access in schools in mitigating the incidence of inequality on poverty in developing countries. Policy implications are discussed in the light of Sustainable Development Goals.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-09-2023-0695

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.

Many countries have a renewed focus on health inequalities since COVID-19. In England, integrated care systems (ICSs), formed in 2022 to promote integration, are required to reduce health inequalities. Integration is supported by population health management (PHM) which links data across health and care organisations to inform service delivery. It is not well-understood how PHM can help ICSs reduce health inequalities. This paper describes development of a programme theory to advance this understanding.

This study was conducted as a mixed-methods process evaluation in a local ICS using PHM. The study used Framework to analyse interviews with health and care professionals about a PHM tool, the COVID-19 vaccination uptake Dashboard. Quantitative data on staff Dashboard usage were analysed descriptively. To develop a wider programme theory, local findings were discussed with national PHM stakeholders.

ICS staff used PHM in heterogeneous ways to influence programme delivery and reduce inequalities in vaccine uptake. PHM data was most influential where it highlighted action was needed for “targetable” populations. PHM is more likely to influence decisions on reducing inequalities where data are trusted and valued, data platforms are underpinned by positive inter-organisational relationships and where the health inequality is a shared priority.

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated a shift toward use of digital health platforms and integrated working across ICSs. This paper used an evaluation of integrated data to reduce inequalities in COVID-19 vaccine delivery to propose a novel programme theory for how integrated data can support ICS staff to tackle health inequalities.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the adjustment of government redistributive policies in Scandinavian and Mediterranean countries following changes in income inequality over the period 1980–2021.

The authors first modelled the time-varying dynamics between income inequality and redistribution and then used a non-linear framework to test for the existence of asymmetries and cointegration in their long-run relationship. The authors used two complementary measures of inequality – the share of total income accruing to top percentile income holders and the ratio of the share of total income accruing to top decile income holders divided by that accumulated by the bottom 50% – and computed redistribution as the difference between the two inequality indicators before and after taxes and transfers.

The authors found that the sign of the relationship between income inequality and redistribution is mostly positive and time-varying. Overall, the authors also found evidence that the impact of increases in inequality on redistributive measures is higher than that of decreases. Finally, the authors obtained a significant long-run relationship between both variables in all countries except Denmark and Spain. These results hold for both Scandinavian and Mediterranean countries.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper to account for the potential existence of non-linearities and to examine the asymmetries in the adjustment of redistributive policies to increases in income inequality using alternative income inequality metrics.

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 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.

The study aims to use individuals using the internet and fixed broadband subscriptions as a proxy for digitalization to empirically assess the effects of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), digitalization and their interaction on income inequality in developed and developing countries from 2002 to 2019.

The paper used the system general method of moments estimators for 30 developed and 35 developing countries.

FDI increases income inequality in developed countries but decreases it in developing countries, digitalization reduces income inequality in both groups and interaction term narrows income inequality in developed countries but widens it in developing countries.

The paper is the first to introduce digitalization into the FDI – income inequality relationship. Furthermore, it provides empirical evidence to show the difference in the role of digitalization in this relationship between developed and developing countries.

This study aims to test the validity of the Rajan theory in South Africa and other selected emerging markets (Chile, Peru and Brazil) during the period 1975–2019.

In this study, the researchers used time-series data to estimate a Bayesian Vector Autoregression (BVAR) model with hierarchical priors. The BVAR technique has the advantage of being able to accommodate a wide cross-section of variables without running out of degrees of freedom. It is also able to deal with dense parameterization by imposing structure on model coefficients via prior information and optimal choice of the degree of formativeness.

The results for all countries except Peru confirmed the Rajan hypotheses, indicating that inequality contributes to high indebtedness, resulting in financial fragility. However, for Peru, this study finds it contradicts the theory. This study controlled for monetary policy shock and found the results differing country-specific.

The findings suggest that an escalating level of inequality leads to financial fragility, which implies that policymakers ought to be cautious of excessive inequality when endeavouring to contain the risk of financial fragility, by implementing sound structural reform policies that aim to attract investments consistent with job creation, development and growth in these countries. Policymakers should also be cautious when implementing policy tools (redistributive policies, a sound monetary policy), as they seem to increase the risk of excessive credit growth and financial fragility, and they need to treat income inequality as an important factor relevant to macroeconomic aggregates and financial fragility.