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This study aims to examine how Islamic educators’ perceptions on the imposition of personal income tax influences tax compliance behaviour in Malaysia.

A qualitative approach was adopted, using semi-structured interviews through online platforms. Participants were Islamic educators from higher educational institutions, who have been taxpayers for at least 10 years. They are assumed to hold high religious values, to possess knowledge about Islamic principles and to have adequate taxpayer experience.

The findings revealed that while all participants agreed that income tax imposition is permissible in Islam, they had different views on taxing side income. Side income from part-time jobs was viewed as taxable income, but side income from Islamic religious preaching was viewed as not subject to tax. Hence, participants’ tax compliance was influenced by their understanding. Wrong understanding leads to unintentional tax non-compliance. This study also found that religiosity promotes tax compliance behaviour.

The present study’s results may help the tax authority develop a mechanism from which to educate taxpayers and increase their awareness about properly reporting income from side jobs.

Prior studies examining the influence of religious beliefs on tax compliance have been conducted across religions. The present study was conducted with Muslim participants in Malaysia, and it used a qualitative approach to explore the issue more in-depth.

This study examines the effect of digital financial inclusion (DFI) on climate change in African countries, taking into account the moderating effect of income inequality.

This study employs panel data from 53 African countries between 2004 and 2021 and utilises the random-effects model and two-step generalised method of moments (GMM) to estimate the relationships amongst DFI, income inequality, CO2 emissions and renewable energy consumption (REC).

Our findings reveal that increased accessibility to automated teller machines (ATMs) leads to a reduction in CO2 emissions and an increase in REC. However, the effect of ATMs on CO2 emissions is stronger for individuals with lower incomes, whereas REC is higher for those with higher incomes. Additionally, mobile cellular subscriptions (MCS) increase both CO2 emissions and REC; however, when income inequality is considered, it results in a reduction in CO2 emissions and an increase in REC. Furthermore, Internet usage reduces CO2 emissions and increases REC in Africa, with income inequality levels further improving its contribution.

ATM accessibility and energy efficiency are means to mitigate carbon dioxide emissions and encourage the adoption of renewable energy sources.

This study is one of the first to explore the effects of income inequality on DFI, CO2 emissions and REC, highlighting its importance in Africa and its potential impact on environmental sustainability.

This paper aims to study the impact of foreign direct investment (FDI) and official development assistance (ODA) on the economic growth of developing countries. This paper classifies sample countries into two groups (low- and high-income developing countries) based on income level and investigates whether the two sources of foreign capital have different effects on the economic development of each subgroup of countries.

The authors analyze panel data on 93 countries from 1981 to 2020 using a two-stage least squares (2SLS) estimation. The 2SLS method is used to overcome the endogeneity problem between economic growth and FDI. The sources of the data are World Bank and OECD.

First, FDI inflows tend to accelerate per capita GDP growth in both total sample countries and within both groups of countries. Second, ODA has a significant impact on per capita GDP growth only for low-income developing countries. This result indicates that ODA seems to be particularly important for low-income developing countries.

This paper suggests policy implications that low-income developing countries should create an environment for more ODA funds to flow into themselves with efforts such as improving the credibility and effectiveness of the government related to ODA programs. It also provides implications for donors of ODA to focus their ODA resources on low-income developing countries to more effectively achieve the goal of helping developing countries’ economic growth.

This paper investigates whether FDI and ODA have different effects on the economic development of low- and high-income developing countries. To the best of authors’ knowledge, this point is not addressed in existing studies.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the linkages between intergenerational income mobility and crime for 27 OECD countries, considering different types of crime, family ties, enforcement, in terms of punishment rate and perceived quality of the legal system, redistributive outcomes and government expenditure.

Using the Global Database of Intergenerational Mobility (GDIM), the empirical analysis is conducted by coupling the principal components analysis with the hierarchical clustering. The variance tests verify the robustness of the clusters.

Income mobility is higher in those countries where there is high public investment devoted to education and high perception of rule of law to buffer the adverse effects of crime on income mobility. The redistributive policies must be oriented to better the wealth distribution and not only income equality opportunity to decrease crime and to increase income mobility. A plausible existence of “hidden” income mobility emerges from the linkages between income mobility and frauds.

More redistributive policies for education, income and wealth equality should be applied in those countries with low income mobility and high violent crime rates; higher punishment rates should be applied to reduce the rates of thefts and frauds in high income mobility countries.

The main contribution is the identification of what type of crime leads to downward income mobility, as well as the role of perceived quality of the legal system, government and family ties in the association between income mobility and crime, suggesting also the potential existence of “hidden” income mobility.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-07-2023-0520

This paper aims to conduct a comparative study on the impact of income diversification and the main non-interest components on banks’ financial performance and risk-adjusted profitability in China and Egypt.

This study uses both static and dynamic panel regression analyses on a sample of Egyptian and Chinese banks from 2009 to 2022.

Income diversification yields positive effects on bank profitability in Egypt and China. Trading income consistently exhibits a significant positive influence on bank profitability in both nations. Conversely, fee-based income positively impacts bank profitability in China, whereas in Egypt, this effect is observed under dynamic-based regression models. On the contrary, income diversification does not consistently increase risk-adjusted profitability in both countries, especially Egypt.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to examine the impact of income diversification on Egyptian bank performance while identifying the most significant non-interest income components. In addition, the comparative analysis conducted in this study reveals the positioning of China, the largest economy among emerging countries, in terms of the degree of income diversification, its impact on bank profitability and the extent to which non-interest income components contribute to bank profitability when compared with Egypt, representing an emerging country characterised by different levels of bank market power, financial infrastructure and expertise. Findings hold significant implications, suggesting that bank managers and policymakers should prioritise diversifying income sources, particularly through fee-based services and trading activities in China, and trading activities in Egypt, to enhance financial profitability.

This study explores whether ethnic minorities exhibit varying levels of income inequality compared to the host population.

The research leverages a unique immigration event in Italy, specifically the settlement of multiple Albanian groups in southern Italy during the 16th century. This historical occurrence enables an investigation into the role of cultural traits in income inequality, as these groups are situated in the same geographical region and often share borders.

The results, which remain consistent after undergoing various robustness checks, indicate that Albanian villages, while still preserving their identity and tradition, tend to experience an approximately 2% lower level of income concentration compared to similar Italian municipalities.

Our findings aim to provide supporting evidence for future policy considerations regarding the long-term impact of immigration on income inequality.

The study examines the impact of fiscal policy shocks on economic growth and income inequality in Ghana. This has become necessary because of the interdependence between growth and income inequality and the role fiscal policy plays in this relationship in the development process of a country. Thus, a study that investigates how government expenditure shock and tax revenue shock influence the relationship between economic growth and income inequality could assist policymakers to adopt the best policy mix to ensure income equity and sustained economic growth in Ghana.

It employs sacrifice ratio from structural VAR model using quarterly time series data from 1996 to 2019 on Ghana.

Our results show that government expenditure shock impacts economic growth, exchange rate and education positively and significantly in the long run. Also, tax revenue shock has a positive impact on income inequality, economic growth and education. The findings further show that there exists a trade-off between economic growth and income inequality in the long run.

The relationships between fiscal policy shocks, economic growth and income inequality have been extensively discussed among scholars. Understanding how these three macroeconomic variables are determined and their interrelationships are crucial for policymakers. This is because fiscal policy aids in both economic growth and income inequality. In the empirical literature, the emphasis has been on independently estimating the growth effects of fiscal policy or the distribution effects of fiscal policy, leaving out the existence of possible trade-off between economic growth and income inequality following a fiscal shock. To the best of our knowledge, no empirical study has been done on Ghana to empirically examine the trade-off between economic growth and income inequality as we do in this paper.

This study aims at examining the value relevance of tax-related information in Canada. Tax-related information in this study includes taxable income, tax aggressiveness, and tax risk (i.e., unsustainable tax planning).

This study analyzes the Canadian listed firms covering the period of 2012–2021 using the Feltham–Ohlson valuation model.

The findings are: (1) taxable income provides incremental value relevance information; (2) tax risk reduces the value relevance of both taxable income and accounting income and (3) tax aggressiveness reduces the value relevance of accounting income but not of taxable income. Further tests show that the COVID-19 pandemic increases the value relevance of taxable income but decreases the value relevance of accounting income. An analysis of the association between stock price volatility and tax-related information documents that taxable income and accounting income are both informative. Tax risk reduces the informativeness of taxable income, but tax aggressiveness and the pandemic do not.

The sample in this study covers the period up to 2021. Future research could use more recent data. Additionally, this study examines the Canadian setting. The results may not be generalized to other countries that have different accounting and tax rules.

This study sheds light on whether tax aggressiveness and tax risk affect the value relevance of taxable income and accounting income separately. In addition, to our knowledge, this is the first study that examines whether tax-related information is informative about stock price volatility.

This paper aims to propose a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model for the State Bank of Vietnam (SBV) to assess the response from the household sector to monetary policy shocks through the consumption function. Moreover, the transmission from monetary policy to household consumption and income distribution is experimented with through the vector autoregression (VAR) model.

In this study, the authors used the maximum likelihood estimation to estimate the DSGE and VAR models with the sample from 1996Q1 to the end of 2021Q4 (104 observations).

The DSGE model’s results show that the response of the household sector is as expected in the theory: a monetary policy shock occurs that increases the policy interest rate by 0.29%, leading to a decrease in consumer spending of about 0.041%, the shock fades after one year. Estimates from the VAR model give similar results: a monetary policy shock narrows income inequality after about 2–3 quarters and this process tends to slow down in the long run.

Based on the research results, the authors propose policy implications for the SBV to achieve the goal of price stability, and stabilizing the macro-economic environment in Vietnam.

The findings of the study have theoretical contributions and empirical scientific evidence showing the effectiveness of the implementation of the SBV’s monetary policy in the context of macro-instability, namely: flexibility, caution and coordination of different measures promptly.

This study aims to revisit the empirical debate about the asymmetric relationship between oil prices, energy consumption, CO₂ emissions and economic growth in a panel of 184 countries from 1981 to 2020.

A relatively new research method, the PVAR system GMM, is applied.

The outcome of the PVAR system GMM model at the group level in the study suggests that oil prices exert a positive but statistically insignificant effect on economic growth. Energy consumption is inversely related to economic growth but statistically significant, and the correlation between CO₂ emissions and economic growth is negative but statistically insignificant. The Granger causality test indicates that oil prices, CO₂ emissions, oil rents, energy consumption and savings jointly Granger-cause economic growth. A unidirectional causality runs from energy consumption, savings and economic growth to oil prices. At countries’ income grouping levels, oil prices, oil rent, CO₂ emissions, energy consumption and savings jointly Granger-cause economic growth for the high-income and upper-middle-income countries groups only, while those variables did not jointly Granger-cause economic growth for the low-income and lower-middle-income countries groups. The modulus emanating from the eigenvalue stability condition with the roots of the companion matrix indicates that the model is stable. The results support the asymmetric impacts of oil prices on economic growth and aid policy formulation, particularly the cross-country disparities regarding the nexus between oil prices and growth.

From a methodological perspective, to the best of the author’s knowledge, the study is the first attempt to use the PVAR system GMM and such a large sample group of 184 economies in the post-COVID-19 era to examine the impacts of oil prices on countries’ growth while controlling for other crucial variables, which is noteworthy. Two, using the World Bank categorisation of countries according to income groups, the study adds another layer of contribution to the literature by decomposing the 184 sample economies into four income groups: high-income, low-income, upper-middle-income and lower-middle-income groups to investigate the potential for asymmetric effects of oil prices on growth, the first of its kind in the post-COVID-19 period.