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Due to the financial disturbances created by the COVID-19 pandemic and the burden on the government exchequer, it is expected to see a rise in the knowledge base of the research corpus so far as the government's fiscal sustainability is concerned. Therefore, the present research examines a systematic quantitative analysis of public debt sustainability research by applying a bibliometric approach. Research also analyzes journals, institutions, countries and authors contributing to public debt sustainability.

This paper scrutinizes the published scientific research on public debt sustainability based on the dataset of 535 articles from 1991 to 2021 obtained from the Scopus database. Biblioshiny (R-based application) and VoSviewer software were used to perform bibliometric analysis through Performance analysis and science mapping techniques. The authors combined co-citation analysis (CCA), bibliometric analysis, keyword co-occurrence analysis (KCA) and a conceptual thematic map of the most cited articles to find the intellectual structure.

The research identified three dominating clusters, e.g. fiscal sustainability and policy rules, empirical sustainability testing and debt and growth dynamics. Another finding was that most articles were analytical and empirical and few descriptive articles were found. Owing to the empirical nature of the domain, the issues concerning public debt sustainability have continued to change over the past decades for different economies, reflecting the complexity and diversity of economic structures of different economies at different times.

The insight of this article provides academicians and researchers with a more refined comprehension of the conceptual and intellectual structure of the research corpus. The present research complements the existing literature review studies by pushing the research towards emerging or less developed issues such as financial and debt crises.

This study explores the role of rising US student loan debt in explaining income inequality.

The study uses the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) modeling approach to explore the short- and long-run impact of college debt on income inequality in the US through quarterly data over the period 2000–2019.

The results demonstrate the detrimental impact of student debt on national and regional income inequality. Moreover, the regional analysis highlights a more pronounced impact of student debt on income distribution in South and West regions. The findings document that these regions, with the lower student debt proportions, have the lowest average cost of attending college. Finally, the analysis explores two potential channels – i.e. race and homeownership – that could explain the link between college student debt and income inequality.

The results can be helpful for policymakers and researchers to formulate practical approaches for assessing and addressing the rising national student debt and income inequality.

This is the first, to the best of the author's knowledge, study that explores the impact of US college debt on income inequality.

On completion of the case study, students will understand the following learning objectives: the characteristics of quantitative easing (QE) and when it may be appropriate to implement QE; how QE differs from a conventional bond purchasing programme; the impact of direct financing of the fiscus by the central bank on its independence; how the macro-economic and political environments affect and influence national economic policy; the difference between traditional and unconventional monetary policies and potential implications for an economy like South Africa. The learnings from this case study can be used in other global economic environments, particularly in emerging markets. This case study provides valuable insights into decision-making, institutional independence, policy coordination, deficit financing, causes and consequences of price inflation, risks relating to monetary instability and the correct application of monetary policy.

After the announcement of the COVID-19-related lockdown in March 2020 and the subsequent slow-down of economic activity in South Africa, the South African Reserve Bank (SARB) had to consider appropriate macro-economic tools to ensure both price and financial stability in South Africa. The macro-economic policy tools had to be considered in light of the South African economic context, which included acknowledgement of South Africa’s debt crisis and slow economic growth. The central bank responded by introducing the following measures: reducing interest rates to a record low of 3.5% to give consumers financial relief and to promote spending in the economy; purchasing government bonds in the secondary markets to stabilise financial markets; facilitating the loan guarantee scheme that was aimed at providing financial relief to small- and medium-sized enterprises; relaxing the capital and liquidity adequacy requirements that commercial banks are required to meet; and ensuring availability of liquidity to banks through facilities such as the weekly repo auctions. However, despite introducing these interventions, the SARB faced calls from politicians, analysts and academics to do more. Various commentators argued that the SARB could introduce QE and directly finance government spending by purchasing government bonds. Some commentators argued that the reluctance of the SARB to pursue these suggestions was a result of the close alignment and relationship between the SARB and National Treasury. The dilemma faced by Governor Lesetja Kganyago of the SARB was threefold, namely, whether it was appropriate for the central bank to pursue the initiatives and, if so, whether the bank could pursue them without compromising its independence, and if the introduction of those initiatives would not adversely affect the ability of the central bank to fulfil its mandate of price stability and financial stability. In this regard, the governor and his executive team were required to consider the long-term implications of introducing the initiatives on consumer price inflation, independence of the SARB and the appropriate use of monetary policy tools to fulfil the central bank’s mandate. But the question was: What policies should the governor favour?

This case study is based on various macro-economic theories. Therefore, it would be useful to teach this case study in macro-economic courses in the following programmes: master’s in business administration, bachelor of commerce, bachelor of economic sciences and business science studies, as well as on executive education programmes, which consider macro-economic policy. In general, students who undertake economics, business and general management, finance, legal, commerce and banking studies could learn from this case study.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS 3: Entrepreneurship.

The peoples’ movement was a movement to deepen citizenship and democracy by demanding actual participation in representative politics. It was a non-violent democratic movement based on independence from political parties, collective informal leadership and multi-level horizontal networking and coordination. It was strengthened by the activists from the student movement, trade unions and working-class parties. It foregrounded issues related to debt and development, Global North–South dynamics, narrowing of representative politics and the role of democratic social movements. The peoples’ movement, ‘Aragalaya’, illustrated that solidarity, cultivated across multiple cultural, economic and political differences, while engaging locally with a global sense, can influence authoritarian militarised governments. In effect, the struggle for democracy and citizenship aimed at transforming representative politics also accompanied alternative notions of well-being and pleasures involving ‘living well together with others’ in harmony with nature.

This paper aims to develop a compound measure, which is fiscal vulnerability index, provides early warning signals of fiscal sustainability problems for Türkiye's economy.

The index is constructed using twelve distinct fiscal indicators and applying the portfolio method, which considers the time-varying cross-correlation structure between the subindices.

Dynamics of the fiscal vulnerability index indicate that it accurately predicts to the well-known fiscal crisis occurring in Türkiye's recent history. As a result, such a compound measure should be used in the early identification of fiscal vulnerability in Türkiye.

The main contribution of this paper, relative to existing papers, is that a fiscal vulnerability index was constructed by employing the most contemporaneous method and evaluating its performance in terms of capturing historical stress periods.

This study aims to re-examine the corruption and sustainable development nexus in Africa and offer a contemporary analytical review and analysis of that relationship in the region.

Drawing on the available and accessible relevant data from credible sources, this work quantifies, outlines and analyses the nexus between corruption and sustainable development, as it applies primarily to sub-Saharan Africa. It uses the relevant disaggregated data and also complements that with the results of reliable empirical studies to further cross-reference and demonstrate the corruption and sustainable development nexus.

It is shown that corruption in Africa continues to be negatively associated with sustainable development objectives and that, in turn, will continue to affect the continent’s progress in achieving sustainable development. Undoubtedly, corruption is very damaging to economies across all nations and regions. However, in Africa, this impact on sustainable development has been particularly severe and ongoing. Consequently, the views expressed several decades ago of corruption being able to grease the wheels and potentially contribute to economic development is not valid and, in fact, has been severally discredited over the years.

The main value of the paper is the insights it provides, and with cross-reference to the empirical literature and time series data, on the corruption and sustainable development nexus in Africa.

In 2014, Japan ratified the CRPD, which spurred to the development of domestic laws; however, the education section of the Convention does not clarify how to educate children with disabilities in inclusive education. Thus, while the global inclusive education goal advocated by UNESCO and other bodies concerns education for all, inclusive education in Japan is seen as education for children with disabilities, and the philosophies and practices are very different. Therefore, this chapter introduces the policies and current practices of inclusive education in Japan and discusses the possibilities for school education reform from the perspective of real inclusive education.

This paper aims to determine whether local governments (LGs) use non-consolidated municipally owned companies (MOCs), excluded from public sector entities and, consequently, from sub-national debt to avoid fiscal debt limits. This paper contributes to the literature by analysing the fiscal debt rule’s impact on the off-budget municipal activities in total and separate in different types of local government units.

This paper uses difference-in-differences and the system general method of moments model with the Blundell–Bond estimator for dynamic panel data analysis of MOCs owned by 866 Polish municipalities in 2010–2018.

This paper shows that the MOCs’ revenues support limited local public debt capacity by indebtedness restrictions imposed on municipalities in 2014. As a result, less indebted municipalities have higher off-budget revenues. The tightening of fiscal rules related to sub-sovereign indebtedness increased off-budget activities, but that effect is much stronger in rural and rural–urban municipalities than in urban municipalities and big cities.

This paper contributes to the literature by exploring the fiscal debt rule’s impact on the off-budget municipal activities in total and separate in different types of local government units. In this paper, the authors combine theories relating to private and public finance; this is a novel approach and one that is also necessary – as, in fact, the worlds of public and private actors intersect – as exemplified by the existence of MOC.