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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.

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.

The purpose of this research is to study what factors influence European citizens in their interaction with government in the EU regions. It analyses the differences across European regions, taking account of each region’s degree of economic development and incorporating different spatially tailored approaches into the analysis.

A logistic regression analysis was used to establish whether the profiles of e-Government users differ according to the development tier they live in and other explanatory variables: socio-demographic, digital skills and type of internet connection.

This research identifies regional inequalities in EU citizens’ digital behaviour with public administration. This statistical study of European regions allows to better apprehend the profile of the EU’s e-citizens and offers conclusions to explain citizens’ behaviour, highlighting the influence of several variables.

Given the lack of pan-European e-government studies at a regional level, this article provides a comparative analysis for the European Union and gives insights into the behaviour of European e-citizens, highlighting the presence of digital inequalities in Europe depending on the region where citizens reside.

This work has as its main objective to discuss the nature of Brazilian Federalism and makes considerations on the origins and deepening of regional inequalities in Brazil. The approach of the work is the consideration that, from the perspective of spatial development, the interference of the Central Government in the economy may follow, in principle, four courses of action. First, the state may interfere in the free play of the market by directing its actions to counteract the automatic operation of the market forces, in order to prevent the trend towards increasing spatial inequality; second the state may adopt a neutral position, leaving market forces to follow their natural course; third, the state may pursue a course of action consistent with the natural trend of the market forces, but without biasing the allocative process; and fourth, the state, finally, may interfere in the free play of the market forces, in such a way as to distort the market‐price mechanism in the wrong direction – and thus, at variance with the precepts of market economic efficiency, without, however, pursuing any objective related to social justice or spatial equity. By analysing the Brazilian federalism in the light of these four possible forms of government actions, the work attempts to unveil the dominant nature of the Brazilian Central Government policies and their spatial implications, in critical moments of the history of the country.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between government and Balinese society in tax decentralization through budgeting seem to insignificantly improve the welfare of Balinese society.

This research was conducted in Bali Province involving eight regencies and one city. The data used in this study were secondary data, derived from relevant institutions or from websites through internet browsing and other documentations in the form of official reports/publications, such as regional budget, accountability reports, regional regulations and documents on budget and development of the regional economy. The present research used the partial least squares analysis technique.

Fiscal decentralization does not necessarily lead to better budget management. The success of fiscal decentralization can be found in the quality of the regional budget and the quality of budget management. The allocation of the regional budget for public service improvement and the development of infrastructure will increase the economic capacity of the regions. Improvement in regional economic capacity encourages the improvement of community welfare.

This income inequality points to the issue of fiscal capacity. The development of the financial role of district/city regions in the Province of Bali remains at a level gap with the development level of community welfare. During this period, the financial role of the government as estimated from the ratio of the national budget to the regional budget is higher than that of the society development. The acceleration role of the government is not proportional to the development of Human Development Index outcomes.

Does the standard of living vary from region to region in Portugal and are spatial units in Portugal converging in income? We observe spatial error dependence between municipalities and estimate spatial econometric models to test convergence. For conditional convergence we conclude that primary sector employment, activity rate, and percentage of active population with higher education are important to distinguish the “steady state” of the regional economies, reflecting the labor market at regional level.

In this chapter, I estimate French regional gross value added per capita in constant terms between 1872 and 1911, to better understand regional inequalities within the country and to allow comparison with other European regions. To this end, I develop a novel regional income estimation model, where income is specified as a function of shifts in sectoral employment structure. Its conceptual basis is uncontroversial, its data requirements are low, and it withstands robustness checks.

Discusses the pattern of the regional distribution in the Chinese economy of Direct foreign investment (DFI) in the context of the open‐door policy and the regional difference in investment environments. Presents a regression analysis on the effects of DFI on the economic growth in the eastern and western regions, using pooled time‐series and cross‐section data for 16 provinces over a seven‐year period (1986‐92). Discusses other important factors influencing regional economic development including rural industry development, differential growth of fixed capital investment and exports, and domestic capital flow from the western region to the eastern region. A case study of the effect of DFI on the intra‐provincial economic inequality in Guangdong Province is presented and some conclusions and policy implications are drawn.