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The COVID-19 pandemic is one of the most pressing issues at present. A question which is particularly important for governments and policy makers is the following: Does the virus spread in the same way in different countries? Or are there significant differences in the development of the epidemic? In this paper, we devise new inference methods that allow to detect differences in the development of the COVID-19 epidemic across countries in a statistically rigorous way. In our empirical study, we use the methods to compare the outbreak patterns of the epidemic in a number of European countries.

With 76% of the total main workforce in agriculture and more than 50% small and medium landowning households, the village provides an important case study for understanding agrarian resilience. The conceptualisation of resilience has been majorly confined to a system or a territorial boundary. Agrarian resilience too is commonly assumed to be driven by forces within the agriculture and the rural. i.e. land ownership remains constant, the labour of the peasantry is spatially limited to agriculture, the capital is generated within agriculture and the networks and skills of the peasantry is also confined to agriculture. This has underscored the role of factors and processes working outside the agriculture in conceptualising agrarian resilience. While the primacy of the agrarian processes cannot be denied, there are often processes working outside an agrarian system that can also enable resilience. i.e. the rural workforce can diversify its labour outside agriculture in the urban non-farm sector, capital can also be generated from sources outside the agriculture. In this context, using the case study of a village dominated by small and medium landowning households in the Patiala district of Punjab in India, the paper shows that resilience is driven by processes both within and outside agriculture.

The occurrence of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) was followed by a small burst of cases around the world; afterward, due to a series of emergency non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), the increasing number of confirmed cases slowed down in many countries. However, the subsequent gradual easing of governance led to a sudden increase in cases in late July 2020, arousing deep concern across the globe. This study evaluates the situation of the COVID-19 pandemic in countries and territories worldwide from January 2020 to February 2021. According to the time-varying reproduction number (R(t)) of each country or territory, the results show that almost half of the countries and territories in the world have never controlled the epidemic. Among the countries and territories that had once contained the occurrence, nearly half failed to maintain their prevention and control, causing the COVID-19 pandemic to rebound across the world—resulting in even higher waves in half of the rebounding countries or territories. This work also proposes and uses a time-varying country-level transmission risk score (CTRS), which takes into account both R(t) and daily new cases, to demonstrate country-level or territory-level transmission potential and trends. Time-varying hierarchical clustering of time-varying CTRS values was used to successfully reveal the countries and territories that contributed to the recent aggravation of the global pandemic in the last quarter of 2020 and the beginning of 2021, and to identify countries and territories with an increasing risk of COVID-19 transmission in the near future. Furthermore, a regression analysis indicated that the introduction and relaxation of NPIs, including workplace closure policies and stay-at-home requirements, appear to be associated with recent global transmission changes. In conclusion, a systematic evaluation of the global COVID-19 pandemic over the past year indicates that the world is now in an unexpected situation, with limited lessons learned. Summarizing the lessons learned could help in designing effective public responses for constraining future waves of COVID-19 worldwide.

We use a newly assembled indicator of corruption from Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) to examine the effects of corruption on economic growth. The V-Dem indicator is coded for almost all contemporary and historical polities since the year 1900 and, for some countries, since the French Revolution. This global dataset allows us to exploit long-run, slow-moving variation within countries for identification, circumventing many of the difficulties faced by previous studies based on cross-section data or short panels. We present robust evidence of a negative effect of corruption on steady-state growth. Yet, we find that corruption interacts with political regime type, giving rise to heterogeneous effects. In particular, corruption is found to be significantly more deleterious for growth in democracies than in autocracies. Since corruption tends to be decentralised in democracies and centralised in autocracies, these findings are in line with theories of the ‘industrial organisation’ of corruption. We find little to no evidence that institutional weaknesses along other dimensions (state capacity, regulatory quality, property rights protection) make corruption any less harmful for growth, casting doubt on the thesis that corruption may ‘grease the wheels’ of dysfunctional institutions. Our findings provide a rationale to target anti-corruption efforts to young democracies.

Foreign aid is one of the most important policy tools that developed countries used to help poor countries improve population well-being and facilitate economic and institutional development. However, the effectiveness of aid as an instrument of development has been questioned several times, especially for its deleterious effects on governance. This study examines the effect of foreign aid on economic complexity in developing countries. Using annual data for 78 developing countries over the period 1990-2017, the empirical findings show that foreign aid exerts a negative effect on economic complexity. Although the effect of aid on economic complexity differs across donors, we also find a U-shaped relationship between foreign aid and economic complexity. In addition, the empirical results of this paper show that democracy mitigates the negative effect of foreign aid on economic complexity. Thus, in order to benefit from the effects of foreign aid for better economic complexity, the governments of developing countries would benefit from putting more effort into improving democracy.

This paper analyses the health policy response to the COVID-19 pandemic in the four Visegrad countries – Czechia, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia – in spring and summer 2020. The four countries implemented harsh transmission prevention measures at the beginning of the pandemic and managed to effectively avoid the first wave of infections during spring. Likewise, all four relaxed most of these measures during the summer and experienced uncontrolled growth of cases since September 2020. Along the way, there has been an erosion of public support for the government measures. This was mainly due to economic considerations taking precedent but also likely due to diminished trust in the government. All four countries have been overly reliant on their relatively high bed capacity, which they managed to further increase at the cost of elective treatments, but this could not always be supported with sufficient health workforce capacity. Finally, none of the four countries developed effective find, test, trace, isolate and support systems over the summer despite having relaxed most of the transmission protection measures since late spring. This left the countries ill-prepared for the rise in the number of COVID-19 infections they have been experiencing since autumn 2020.

The authors present an integrated macroeconomic approach to monitoring progress toward achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in Sub-Saharan Africa. At the heart of their approach is a macroeconomic model that captures key linkages between foreign aid, public investment (disaggregated into education, infrastructure, and health), the supply side, and poverty. The model is linked through cross-section regressions to indicators of malnutrition, infant mortality, life expectancy, and access to safe water. A composite MDG indicator is also calculated. The functioning of the framework is illustrated by simulating the impact of an increase in aid and a debt write-off for Niger at the MDG horizon of 2015, under alternative assumptions about the degree of efficiency of public investment. The authors'approach can serve as the building block of Strategy Papers for Human Development (SPAHD), a more encompassing concept than the current"Poverty Reduction"Strategy Papers.

The objective of this study is to measure the energy poverty containing a multi-dimensional and comprehensive set of indicators by combining them via the GRA-SRA method. It involved a case study comprising N11 countries using data from 2001 to 2017. A multidimensional energy poverty index was constructed by combining 13 indicators across 3 dimensions (energy availability, energy cleanability and energy affordability) of the N11 countries. The results prove that the overall energy poverty is being alleviated. It was found that Bangladesh (0.65) and Pakistan (0.47) are the most vulnerable economies in terms of energy poverty while the Philippines (0.36), Indonesia (0.33), and Vietnam (0.28) are less prone to energy poverty. A relative variation in energy poverty was found between N11 countries where South Korea experienced a continuous improvement in energy poverty while Iran showed a decreasing trend with a fluctuating pattern. Furthermore, this study provides an international comparison analysis on energy poverty. The results clarify that the energy types used for heating, are essential in the context of energy poverty and inequality. This study highlights the significance and usefulness of cross-border comparisons of regions with similar climatic or other circumstantial factors. Higher energy availability causes a decrease in energy poverty. In return, lower level of energy poverty leads lower income inequality.

Introduction This study connects the aggregate strength of public health policies taken in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S. states to the governors’ party affiliations and to state-level outcomes. Understanding the relationship between politics and public health measures can better prepare American communities for what to expect from their governments in a future crisis and encourage advocacy for delegating public health decisions to medical professionals. Methods The public health Protective Policy Index captures the strength of policy response to COVID-19 at the state level. The authors estimated a Bayesian model that links the rate of disease spread to Protective Policy Index. The model also accounted for the possible state-specific undercounting of cases and controls for state population density, poverty, number of physicians, cardiovascular disease, asthma, smoking, obesity, age, racial composition, and urbanization. A Bayesian linear model with natural splines of time was employed to link the dynamics of Protective Policy Index to governors’ party affiliations. Results A 10–percentage point decrease in Protective Policy Index was associated with an 8% increase in the expected number of new cases. Between late March and November 2020 and at the state-specific peaks of the pandemic, the Protective Policy Index in the states with Democratic governors was about 10‒percentage points higher than in the states with Republican governors. Conclusions Public health measures were stricter in the Democrat-led states, and stricter public health measures were associated with a slower growth of COVID-19 cases. The apparent politicization of public health measures suggests that public health decision making by health professionals rather than by political incumbents could be beneficial.

The novel coronavirus disease has spread uncontrollably all over the world within a short span of time and has affected the development of the world in many ways. All the nations have directed their technical, financial and political resources towards controlling COVID-19 pandemic across the world. It is predicted that the impact of this crisis will remain for longer period of time, affecting the livelihood of people and all those activities that were contributing to the development of the nations across the globe. In fact, the most promising and significant seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that were adopted in the year 2015 by the United Nations (UN) Member States addressing various global issues, now seem difficult to be achieved by 2030 due to coronavirus pandemic. However, even though the COVID-19 pandemic might have turmoil effect on the existing growth of the world, still few positive developments may be observed in the long run due to this pandemic. Therefore, this study focuses on identifying and quantifying the impact of COVID-19 pandemic in achieving the UN SDGs. This study brings out both negative as well as positive influences of the pandemic on the environment and energy related SDGs. The study uses Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to calculate the weights of the identified positive and negative influences for each environment and energy related goals. Further, 4–1 ratings are used to identify the severity of the influences on the SDGs. Finally, a score is calculated using weights and ratings that indicates the overall impact of the pandemic on environment and energy related SDGs. The result obtained in the study shows that the pandemic offers an opportunity to develop action plans that can build more environmentally sustainable future.

International audience; There is increasing evidence that elimination strategies have resulted in better outcomes for public health, the economy, and civil liberties than have mitigation strategies throughout the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. With vaccines that offer high protection against severe forms of COVID-19, and increasing vaccination coverage, policy makers have had to reassess the trade-offs between different options. The desirability and feasibility of eliminating SARS-CoV-2 compared with other strategies should also be re-evaluated from the perspective of different fields, including epidemiology, public health, and economics. To end the pandemic as soon as possible-be it through elimination or reaching an acceptable endemic level-several key topics have emerged centring around coordination, both locally and internationally, and vaccine distribution. Without coordination it is difficult if not impossible to sustain elimination, which is particularly relevant in highly connected regions, such as Europe. Regarding vaccination, concerns remain with respect to equitable distribution, and the risk of the emergence of new variants of concern. Looking forward, it is crucial to overcome the dichotomy between elimination and mitigation, and to jointly define a long-term objective that can accommodate different political and societal realities.

This study examines agrobiodiversity production and consumption among indigenous people and smallholders engaged with cascading migration, coca, and water resource changes. Addressing the questions if and how agrobiodiversity is viable amid intensifying extra-local influences, it combines the theorization of a pathway that has emerged via infrastructure entanglements and the extended case study of local utilization practices. The theoretical orientation integrates key elements of political ecology and social-ecological systems. We undertook surveys, interviews, and ethnographic participant observation in 10 communities and villages of Cochabamba, Bolivia, between 1990 and 2013. Results show how agrobiodiversity was utilized at moderate-high levels in the land and water systems, foods, and other uses of indigenous peasants and smallholder farmers in the 1990–2013 period even as certain minor crops were significantly reduced. Moreover, the results reveal how agrobiodiversity and agrobiodiverse foods have functioned in production and consumption amid the infrastructure entanglements of migration, roads, and irrigation. Embeddedness as both quotidian resource capacities and contingent sociocultural symbols was hinged to agrarian change in these accelerated entanglements. Mobilities of both meaning and people in recent infrastructure entanglement is characteristic of the unfolding utilization of agrobiodiversity and agrobiodiverse foods. Social power in the complex contours of accelerated entanglement have furnished meanings ranging from the resistance politics of indigenous people and smallholders to the purposeful agendas of more powerful groups. The conclusion highlights how dynamic agrobiodiversity utilization has emerged via the pathway of indigenous people and smallholders who are engaged in cascading, extra-local entanglements.

Nearly two years since the start of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, which has caused over 5 million deaths, the world continues to be on high COVID-19 alert. The World Health Organization (WHO), in collaboration with national authorities, public health institutions and scientists have been closely monitoring and assessing the evolution of SARS-CoV-2 since January 2020 (WHO 2021a; WHO 2021b). The emergence of specific SARS-CoV-2 variants were characterised as Variant of Interest (VOI) and Variant of Concern (VOC), to prioritise global monitoring and research, and to inform the ongoing global response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The WHO and its international sequencing networks continuously monitor SARS-CoV-2 mutations and inform countries about any changes that may be needed to respond to the variant, and prevent its spread where feasible. Multiple variants of the virus have emerged and become dominant in many countries since January 2021, with the Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta variants being the most prominent to date. (Table 1).

Institutional quality in the form of extractive or inclusive institutions influences economic outcomes. We examine the positive moderating effect of institutional quality on the relationship between financial inclusion and poverty alleviation over a sample of seventy-five developing and developed countries (2004–2017). We use six different financial inclusion measures together with an informal political institution variable, applying both cross-section and quantile analysis. We find that institutional quality intensifies the beneficial effects of financial inclusion on poverty rates. This effect is more pronounced in poorer economies than in wealthier ones. Our findings yield implications for policy makers seeking to tackle the institutional causes of poverty.

Photovoltaic poverty alleviation (PVPA), an innovative and unique policy in China aiming at green development and poverty alleviation, has attracted increasing attention from both the public and government. It is therefore useful to provide a comprehensive understanding of the impacts of PVPA and its policy implication. By means of a systematic review, this study constructed the expected causal chain of PVPA based on the Theory of Change (TOC), and verified the extent to which the causality matches the existing 44 literature on China’s PVPA from English and Chinese scholarly databases. Results indicate that the identification of PVPA targets is generally accurate, but the annual revenue of 3,000 yuan per household cannot be fully guaranteed. The beneficiaries of PVPA cover individuals/households, villages/communities and counties/areas, and there are positive effects on income, employment, local capability building, industrial development, carbon emissions reduction, environmental and energy consciousness and living environment. However, excessive investment inhibits the promotion efficiency of poverty alleviation, and the causality between PVPA and energy transition needs strong evidence. We emphasize a comprehensive evaluation in the pilot period to avoid widespread disorder among different departments, which claims for high governance capacity and more attention to the households’ sense of gain. Policymakers should give full consideration to the participation of poor households to provoke their initiative out of poverty and design systematic policies with diversified livelihood strategies for the poor to fight against the multi-dimensional poverty. Moreover, the characteristics of the poor and their external living environment need to be taken into account to formulate targeted policies.

The economic crisis triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic seems to be grimmer when observed from the migration perspective. Remittances play a vital role in economic development of India through promoting output growth, household spending on health and education, poverty alleviation, financial inclusion and entrepreneurship. Given the importance of remittances, it is important to analyse how the current pandemic will influence the remittances inflows to India. Towards this end, the study employs a gravity model approach to the determinants of remittances with special attention to the impact of infectious diseases in the host countries. The present study constructs a dataset on bilateral remittances from 99 destination countries and utilizes the data on prevalence of infectious diseases in the host countries during the period 2000–2018 to assess the impact of the latter on the inflows of remittances to India. The results of the study based on a variety of estimators tackling various econometric issues suggest a statistically significant negative impact of prevalence of infectious diseases in the host country on the inflows of remittances. The negative impact of infectious diseases on remittances suggest that while there are downside risks in the wake of current pandemic, the scenario does not seem to be that bleak as the remittances to India are countercyclical with respect to economic growth in the home country and largely decoupled from host country macroeconomic fundamentals. As the remittances act as shock absorbers during the time of low economic growth in the home country, India must further build up a conducive eco system to nurture these valuable foreign exchange in a well directed manner.

Participatory development is designed to mitigate problems of political bias in pre-existing local government but also interacts with it in complex ways. Using a five-year randomized controlled study in 97 clusters of villages (194 villages) in Ghana, we analyze the effects of a major participatory development program on participation in, leadership of and investment by preexisting political institutions, and on households’ overall socioeconomic well-being. Applying theoretical insights on political participation and redistributive politics, we consider the possibility of both cross-institutional mobilization and displacement, and heterogeneous effects by partisanship. We find the government and its political supporters acted with high expectations for the participatory approach: treatment led to increased participation in local governance and reallocation of resources. But the results did not meet expectations, resulting in a worsening of socioeconomic wellbeing in treatment versus control villages for government supporters. This demonstrates international aid’s complex distributional consequences. Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

There has been an increase in the use of renewable energy sources over recent years, which has led to a strand of literature examining the determinants of renewable energy consumption. However, most of the research used linear estimation models while reviewing the determinants of renewable energy consumption and ignored the indirect effect of democratic institutions on renewable energy consumption. With the use of a panel threshold model, this paper demonstrates that democratic institutions play a significant role in renewable energy consumption. In countries in which the democratic rights of people are preserved better, higher economic growth leads to increased use of renewable energy consumption; however, there is a negative association between economic growth and renewable energy consumption in less democratic countries. Increased trade openness leads to lower growth rates of renewable energy consumption in less democratic countries, while increases in real oil prices lead to increased renewable energy consumption in less democratic countries but play no significant role in more democratic countries. The findings of this paper suggest that democratic institutions are vital in channelling economic resources (economic growth) to renewable energy, and increased trade openness is associated with lower rates of renewable energy deployment in less democratic countries.

In this article, the authors reflect on social consequences of the deagrarianization process, based on their study conducted in the Blaszki commune in central Poland. The study shows deagrarianization in the making, as the region is prone to land being concentrated among the largest farms and to the deactivation of the majority of smallholders. Our research indicates how farmers specialize, quit livestock farming, and endure work overload. It also shows attitudes among younger farmers, who in most cases reject farming as their future career. Among the social consequences of deagrarianization, we note the erosion of community life, conflicts between entrepreneurial farmers and smallholders, and growing distrust. We then reflect on the deagrarianization process's roots, which lie in anti-peasant prejudices and the modernization paradigm in Polish social sciences and in the public sphere.

Sanctuary policies may attract criminals and lower the opportunity cost of crime, while these policies produce a spiral of trust that supports police and raises informal social control over crime. I estimate the dynamic effects of sanctuary policies on crime rates at city level. This paper finds (1) no evidence that sanctuary policies cause an increase in any crime, (2) some evidence that they may lead to a decrease in property crime, and the effect is strengthened over time after the adoption, (3) the increased trust between residents and police is likely the reason for the negative effect.

The information and communication technology, represented by the broadband Internet, has made a profound impact on Chinese urban labor market. However, the effect of broadband Internet on inter-city inequality is less well documented, especially concerning income inequality. This study aims to identify the impact of broadband Internet on income distribution between cities in China and further explore its underlying mechanisms. Based on nationally representative subsamples from the census in 2005, 2010 and 2015, we find broadband Internet is a blessing factor in explaining the inter-city income gap. The conclusion remains stable after overcoming the endogeneity issues with instrumental variables. Interestingly, broadband Internet appears to provide digital dividend for the low-income brackets. Notably, broadband Internet seems to be skill-biased, since it favors highly educated and professional workers, as well as China’s eastern and central regions. Market potential and manufacturing agglomeration are two mechanisms underlying the reducing effects of broadband Internet. These findings provide insights that are valuable for designing policies and strategies aimed at ensuring fairness and efficiency in broadband Internet development.

Geography is suitable for the study of sustainability from a transdisciplinary perspective, which takes the human-land relationship as the core research. As a key obstacle to rural sustainability, poverty is an external manifestation of the coupling maladjustment of elements in human-land territorial systems. As the world's largest developing country, China eradicated extreme poverty in 2020 and made significant contributions to global poverty reduction. Especially over the last eight years, China has implemented a targeted poverty alleviation (TPA) strategy and has continuously promoted theoretical, organizational and institutional innovations for poverty reduction. From the perspective of geography, this paper extracts the experiences of China's TPA strategy, represented by the "5W2H" mode. The research concludes that: (1) Precise identification, as the foundation of TPA, aims to introduce a registration system to obtain records of all poor households and then answer the "5W" (what, where, why, who, when) issues of the geography of poverty. (2) Precise assistance is the key of TPA, which aims to solve the issue of "how to offer help and support". The barriers to escaping poverty can be accomplished through policies and measures that focus on the diverse causes of poverty and considering different situations. (3) Accurate assessments are an essential means of TPA, relevant to solve "how to measure the end of poverty alleviation", and third-party evaluations play an important role in improving the accuracy of poverty alleviation. (4) The TPA mechanism lies in reconstructing the human-land-industry structures in the impoverished areal system. It is urgent to introduce China's successful experience and typical modes of TPA for global human-earth system coordination and sustainable development and contribute to building a community of human destiny.

This paper examines the dynamics of deindustrialization in developed countries during the 1970–2015 period, investigating the patterns and factors underlying manufacturing employment growth in 12 developed economies. The study discloses seven key findings with valuable policy insights. In particular, the paper shows that deindustrialization is a persistent pattern that experienced a significant structural change in the post-1990 period, in which the acceleration of globalization with the rise of North-South trade appeared to have a significant effect. Furthermore, industries with higher relative labour productivity are significantly more resistant to deindustrialization, particularly in the post-1990 period, and this effect is stronger for low-tech industries. In addition, deindustrialization tends to be more severe in countries with larger populations and a deficit-prone trade balance, and these links have become more pronounced in the post-1990 period.

The impact of human capital on inclusive growth manifests in several forms. An improvement in human capital can directly influence inclusive growth and indirectly through innovation. Also, human capital serves as a key driver of innovation and knowledge diffusion hence, enhancing labour capacity will facilitate new ideas and technological adoption. Evidence on this relationship are scanty, hence, this study explores the relationship between human capital, innovation, and inclusive growth in sub-Saharan Africa. The fixed-effects model was deployed to examine this relationship in 17 sub-Saharan African countries between 1998 and 2014. The results from the scatterplot suggest that human capital and innovation measures positively correlate with inclusive growth. More so, our empirical results show that different measures of human capital propel inclusive growth as the quality measures (total factor productivity and index of human capital) have significant impact. On innovation measures, the results reveal that investment and ICT positively influence inclusive growth, however, their magnitudes remain inconsequential. Regarding the interaction terms, the results indicate that the indirect impact of human capital through innovation was largely negative. Hence, this study reveals that the level of human capital is not large enough to promote innovative activities and technological advancement in the region.

In this paper, the relationship between institutional development and the risks of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in emerging Southeast Asian countries and the United States is investigated within a dynamic framework. The paper observes how two different types of national governance systems (well-developed vs. underdeveloped) influence firm risk. We also evaluate how ownership structure affects the impact of institutional environment quality on the risks of firms. We find that an improvement in institutional quality can reduce risks for SMEs in emerging Southeast Asian countries. However, there is no evidence of a relation between institutional development and firm risk in the United States. Our further analysis indicates that the adverse association between institutional development and risk is more pronounced for foreign-owned firms in both contexts studied. In contrast, state-owned firms in emerging Southeast Asian countries weaken the performance of increased institutional development in reducing firm risk, while this effect of state ownership does not exist in the United States.

Individuals threatened by environmental risks may choose migration as a survival or adaptation strategy. However, various factors such as attachment to place may encourage immobility despite disaster risks. Since the collapse of the USSR, residents of Tajikistan’s Pamir Mountains have faced significant political and socioeconomic difficulties and been exposed to environmental hazards such as floods, rockslides, landslides, and avalanches. These hazards put human security, infrastructure, food security, and accessibility to mountainous areas at risk and call into question aspirations to remain. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the Bartang Valley, this article addresses immobility in a context of changes and risks. The concept of place attachment is used to explore people-place relationships, voluntary immobility and in-situ adaptation. Results show that place attachment is shaped by cultural, socioeconomic, ecological, and historical variables and that the relationship between place attachment and mobility is complex. The strong place attachment of the Bartangis influences immobility aspirations, short-distance displacements, and return after international out-migration. Findings suggest a mutually reinforcing relation between place attachment, immobility aspirations, and adaptive capacity to disasters, which points to a need for more attention to voluntary immobility and people-place relationships within environmental mobilities research.

Challenges caused by global climate change arise several environmental, social, and energy production issues. These problems firstly concern interest of resource extraction countries, triggering inter-fuel competition in both directions supply and consumption of energy resources. Moreover, significantly increased green agenda leads countries to foster shifting to green energy production and discovering factors of most influential on the acceleration of RES consumption. The paper focuses on the impact assessment of economic, environmental and institutional factors of the country development on the future consumption of renewable energy sources (RES). To achieve the purpose of the study a panel data analysis method was used. The analysis was conducted for 41 European countries for 1995–2018, with countries being divided into members of Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD)/non-OECD and Extractive/non-Extractive. Four hypotheses were tested under the research: (1) Developing countries are characterized by the negative impact of CO2 emissions on RES consumption, while developed countries — the opposite; (2) Non-RES consumption reflects inter-fuel competition, expressed in a negative relationship with the RES; (3) Prices increase for non-RES contributes to growth of RES consumption; (4) Institutional factors reflect the level of ”market freedom and mobility” of the country and contribute to the development of RES. The authors confirmed all hypothesizes and showed that economic, particularly GDP, and institutional factors had the greatest impact on all countries’ RES consumption, while the environmental aspect is weakly significant for non-extractive countries. Consumption of fossil resources had a negative impact and confirmed the presence of inter-fuel competition.

This study explores the progress of and the challenges to poverty eradication programs in Indonesia by analyzing various social assistance programs and subsidies. Earlier poverty eradication programs such as food-based assistance and energy subsidies were only designed to increase households’ purchasing power. Later, the government also developed more advanced programs, such as conditional cash transfer, school assistance, and health insurance contribution assistance, to address long-run poverty by improving human capital quality. Common challenges of the existing programs remain, including inaccurate target the poor and lack of complementarity between programs. An exercise using a dynamic Computable General Equilibrium model shows that integrating programs into the conditional cash transfer reduces poverty further in rural and urban areas.

In Brazil, the Semi-arid is the poorest region in the country, where a significant part of the population is not adapted to drought and fluctuations in rainfall. Based on multivariate methods, I investigate here the spatial patterns of drought and socioeconomic variables between 2000 and 2010 within the Brazilian Semi-arid. In this work, I find five well-defined socio-environment clusters presenting distinct characteristics: developing cluster, demographic gains cluster, stagnated cluster, socio-environmental challenges cluster and undeveloped cluster. My results show that there are vast areas in the Brazilian Semi-arid that demand development strategies and deep structural changes. Policies for development and poverty alleviation focused essentially on increasing income will not necessarily have an immediate impact on other important social indicators, such as mortality and illiteracy rates. Multidimensional approaches and multiscale interventions considering partnerships among all levels of government (local, state and federal) are essential to overcome this vicious cycle linking environment constrains with poverty and low development levels. Finally, this paper shows that integrating socioeconomic, demographic and environmental indicators is vital to understanding development patterns throughout the Brazilian Semi-arid.

During the past few decades, the Asia-Pacific region grew much faster than any other part of the world while Latin America and the Caribbean largely stagnated. Since innovation is a key ingredient of economic growth and becoming a central tenant of policy, we analyze and compare innovation in the two regions. The data clearly show that Asia-Pacific innovates more than Latin America and the Caribbean, which implies that greater innovation may have contributed to its superior growth performance. To offer substantive policy advisory we present novel results. Formal empirical analysis based on panel regression techniques shows that investment in R&D, secondary school enrolment, and infrastructure access have positive effects on innovation. Our descriptive and empirical analysis therefore yield important policy implications for promoting innovation policy in the two regions.

In recent years, the entrepreneurial ecosystem approach has gained particular interest worldwide for understanding the context of entrepreneurship at the macro level. However, although the sports sector is gaining importance in the European Union and can improve people's health, generate employment, and contribute to countries' GDP, no research from this perspective has been found. Thus, this paper aims to analyze the influence of different indicators related to innovation on European Union countries' shared sport-related GDP (last data available from 2012 were used). The results showed that 12 solutions could explain 76% of the cases of high levels of shared sport-related GDP. The most important solution is the combination of high levels of creativity*high levels of knowledge and technology*high levels of business* high levels of infrastructure*high levels of human capital and research (consistency: 0.80; raw coverage: 0.50). Finally, some guidelines to develop a sport entrepreneurial ecosystem are proposed.

Politics may color interpretations of facts, and thus perceptions of risk. We find that a higher share of Trump voters in a county is associated with lower perceptions of risk during the COVID-19 pandemic. Controlling for COVID-19 case counts and deaths, as Trump's vote share rises in the local area, individuals search less for information on the virus and its potential economic impacts, and engage in fewer visits to non-essential businesses. Our results suggest that politics and the media may play an important role in determining the formation of risk perceptions, and may therefore affect both economic and health-related reactions to unanticipated health crises.

To design and implement effective post-COVID-19 macroeconomics policies to tackle poverty in SSA, policymakers need to understand the factors shaping poverty in the region. This paper investigates the effect of international remittances and financial development on poverty alleviation in 44 sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries from 2010 to 2019. The instrumental variable generalised method of moment technique results indicated that while remittances increase poverty, financial development contributes significantly to poverty reduction. The results consistently revealed that remittances increase both male and female poverty rates, while financial development significantly reduces male and female poverty rates. Other factors such as economic growth, foreign direct investment, and trade openness contributed significantly to reducing poverty. In contrast, government expenditure and foreign aid were found to increase poverty rate in SSA. These results are robust to the Lewbel two-stage least squares estimator. The practical implications of these findings for post-COVID-19 macroeconomic policies for SSA are discussed.

Rising poverty levels in Sub-Saharan Africa requires a better understanding of inclusive growth determinants to develop effective policy responses. Using panel data from 44 Sub-Saharan African countries for the period 1990–2018, we compute measures of inclusive growth based on gender and the rural–urban divide. We account for endogeneity, cross-sectional dependence, and heteroscedasticity, and estimate an inclusive growth model using the instrumental variable generalized method of moments (IV-GMM) estimator. The empirical evidence indicates that the impact of informality on inclusive growth depends on the measure of informality and inclusiveness. Our results show that financial inclusion exhibits an inverted-U-shaped relationship with inclusive growth. Also, we find that the moderating role of financial inclusion in the informality–inclusive growth nexus is mixed. Our results are robust to alternative model specifications and highlight the importance of financial inclusion and informality in influencing inclusive growth in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Numerous studies in the literature have investigated the effect of financial development on poverty, and tend to report a poverty reduction effect of financial development. The present paper considers the issue the other way around, by examining the effect of poverty on financial development. In particular, it has investigated the financial development effect of poverty through the human capital channel. Additionally, it has examined whether the effect of poverty on financial development depends on countries' level of trade openness. The analysis is carried out using a sample of 136 countries (both developed and developing countries) over the period 1995–2017, and the two-step Generalized Methods of Moments (GMM). Results have shown that higher poverty rates undermine the development of the financial sector, and this effect works through the human capital development channel. In fact, higher poverty rates are associated with lower financial development in countries that accumulate less human capital. Furthermore, trade openness matters for the effect of poverty on financial development. Specially, higher poverty rates undermine the expansion of the financial sector in the context of lower levels of trade openness. Thus, greater trade openness helps to mitigate the negative financial development effect of poverty, and this negative effect may turn out to be positive for very high levels of trade openness.

Type 1 diabetes is on the rise globally; however, the burden of mortality remains disproportionate in low-income and middle-income countries (LMICs). As 2021 marks 100 years since the discovery of insulin, we revisit progress, global burden of type 1 diabetes trends, and understanding of the pathogenesis and management practices related to the disease. Despite much progress, inequities in access and availability of insulin formulations persist and are reflected in differences in survival and morbidity patterns related to the disease. Some of these inequities have also been exacerbated by health-system challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic. There is a clear opportunity to improve access to insulin and related essential technologies for improved management of type 1 diabetes in LMICs, especially as a part of universal health coverage. These improvements will require concerted action and investments in human resources, community engagement, and education for the timely diagnosis and management of type 1 diabetes, as well as adequate health-care financing. Further research in LMICs, especially those in Africa, is needed to improve our understanding of the burden, risk factors, and implementation strategies for managing type 1 diabetes.

According to social disorganization theory, a well-developed family and community structure is a pre-condition for low crime rates. Using annual data for 16 advanced countries constructed for two centuries, this paper examines the extent to which the changing family and community structures over the past two centuries have influenced the evolution of crime. Furthermore, we test whether a weakened family structure has a stronger effect on crime in communities with weak social networks by allowing for the interaction between urbanization (community network) and divorce rates (family network). Broadly, we find that changes in family and community structures and their interaction have been influential for the evolution of crime rates since 1810.

This paper investigates the effects of governance quality on exports in sub-Saharan African countries. We include the six worldwide governance indicators (i.e., voice and accountability, political stability, regulatory quality, rule of law, control of corruption, and government effectiveness) as explanatory factors for exports and its components in a sample of 45 countries over the period 1996–2019. System GMM approach is privileged for estimations. We find that total exports and exports of services are positively affected by the six governance indicators, while manufactured goods are positively associated with those indicators except government effectiveness. While political stability, voice and accountability, rule of law, and control of corruption have positive effects on exports of goods, only voice and accountability impact positively primary commodities. This indicates that sub-Saharan African countries should focus on strengthening political governance and improving business environment to boost exports.

After more than a year with COVID-19, it becomes increasingly clear that certain variants of concern have the potential to be game changers, determining the future of our aviation. These variants pose significant health threats and possibly undermine ongoing vaccination efforts. Recent research showed that flight bans on the initial SARS-CoV-2 outbreak in January 2020 were implemented too late and therefore, turned out to be largely ineffective, enabling a swift turn into a fully-blown pandemic. In this study, we investigate the following question: How effective were existing flight bans against the newly emerged variants of concern? In other words: Do airlines and countries happen to repeat the same mistake again? We analyze the spread of the three most prevalent variants of concern right now: B.1.1.7 (known as the UK variant), B.1.351 (known as the South African variant), and P.1 (known as the Brazilian variant). We find that many countries, again, implemented flights bans once the mutated virus had enough time to be imported via air transportation. To support our empirical analysis further, we designed and implemented a compartmental network spreading model on top of worldwide flight data for the years 2020 and 2021. We observe that the model predictions are rather accurate and confirm our findings. Overall, we hope that our study encourages air transportation stakeholders and policy makers to avoid repeating earlier mistakes in the future, with the ultimate goal to overcome COVID-19 entirely.

China is now facing trade-offs between economic growth and the resulting environmental and social burdens. In the 14th Five-Year Plan and the 2035 long-term goal, China put forward in-depth sustainable development strategies. To examine sustainability, a metric reflecting social and environmental costs is necessary, such as the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI). However, data quality has become an important factor affecting the credibility of the included items in GPI. Hence, we conducted the first China Genuine Progress indicator Survey (CGPiS) at the micro-household level containing 42,000 samples. Based on this, we improved the GPI framework covering 23 subitems and measured China's national-level and provincial-level GPI in 2016. The results indicate that a region with a higher GDP usually has a higher GPI, while the gaps of sustainable economic welfare measured by GPI between regions are larger than the GDP gaps. Environmental accounts in all measured provinces are negative. Housework and volunteer service in the social account have great potential contributions to the future growth of GPI. Our findings are essential for driving changes in China's economic governance to realize sustainable development and promoting the GPI application in pilot cities.

Research into the social dimensions of climate decision making has proliferated in recent years. This body of work is informed by principles from decision science and addresses questions around when and why people adopt behaviors in response to climate change. The vast majority of this research is based on studies in relatively wealthier populations that are predominantly from industrialized nations, yet those most impacted by climate change are small-scale farmers in areas that also are experiencing the compounding effects of high rates of poverty. In the following article we look at recent findings from decision science to explore why and how research should be reoriented to provide insight into climate related decision making among smallholder farmers in areas with limited infrastructure and few public services.

Uneven access to low carbon finance and technology may give rise to energy transition frontrunners and laggards. This article offers a first conceptualization of the risks of an uneven energy transition and its implications for the international political economy and corroborates those with an empirical investigation of elite risk perceptions in the energy industry and finance sector. The multi-method approach combines descriptive survey data with a multinomial logistic regression testing for different expert risk perceptions between sectors, complemented by a set of qualitative interviews. The findings suggest that uneven transition patterns increase the risks of economic instability and decrease the competitiveness of ‘late decarbonizers’. Feedback cycles might impede the latter to catch up, with potentially severe consequences for global equity and international tensions. Countries particularly in the Global South are exposed to higher transition risks than technology-leading economies of the Global North. With this, the paper highlights the importance of relative timing for the implementation of energy transition policies.

This paper reviews the prospect to institute the inter-state hydrogen energy system on selected countries in Asia-Pacific region, through individual evaluation from the nexus of technology, social and economy perspectives, and further utilizing the respective strengths to identify the inter-state hydrogen network strategy in Asia-Pacific region, or ‘Asia-Pacific Hydrogen Valley’. Domestic energy self-sufficiency based on the existing energy sources produced nationally is also considered in the review. In looking into the prospective of hydrogen energy system adoption, four indicators are set based on domestic energy capacity, national wealth, society development and research and development (R&D), which are generalized according to the population size of the country. Countries of assessment are Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei Darussalam, Philippines, Singapore, Vietnam, Thailand, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand. This study reveals that nations with active hydrogen policies and high R&D capacity could lead the strategy, while countries with high capacity in primary energy supply and economy advantage would benefit the group in catering the energy and commercial resources, respectively. Social acceptance is another critical aspect, as countries with high social security index could potentially reduce the risk of public rebuttal against the energy system transformation. This paper also extensively discusses the existing energy profile, policies and strategies of each country, which become the basis in potential identification of the country to adopt the new hydrogen energy system in the future.

The main objective of this study is to investigate the effects of industrialization, economic growth, and globalization processes on the ecological footprint and healthcare expenditures in the ten countries with the highest healthcare expenditures from 1995-2018 using the Stochastic Impacts by Regression on the Population, Affluence, and Technology (STIRPAT) framework. In order to estimate the influence of these variables, this study applied a second-generation approach after confirming the possible cross-sectional dependency across countries. The findings indicate that industrialization, healthcare expenditures, and economic growth are more responsible for increasing the pollution level. In contrast, globalization and the urbanization process significantly reduce environmental damage. Moreover, the ecological footprint, urban population, industrialization, and economic growth increase healthcare expenditures while globalization reduces them. In addition, the causality test discovered that bidirectional causality exists between healthcare expenditures, the urban population, industrialization, and the ecological footprint. Furthermore, unidirectional causality is discovered from economic growth and globalization to the ecological footprint. Moreover, the conclusions are robust to various robustness checks that we executed to examine the reliability/accuracy of our main findings. Based on the empirical findings, several policy implications are suggested for these countries with high healthcare expenditures.

Deemed as a multifaceted problem, energy poverty results in multiple forms of vulnerabilities. Using data on Ghana, we test the social vulnerability aspect of energy poverty by estimating its effect on subjective social status. Instrumenting energy poverty with energy prices, we observe a quadratic (U-shaped) relationship between multidimensional energy poverty and social status. This relationship is consistent across rural-urban and male-headed subgroups. Thus, further deprivation in modern energy services does not deteriorate one's social image but rather enhances it. Additionally, we find household income and education as essential channels through which energy poverty affects subjective social status. With existing global policies currently running to eradicate energy poverty, other approaches that aim to increase household income and education can reinforce each other to enhance the social image and increase household energy access.

Background Food systems have become a privileged sphere for explaining the past and present of peoples, and, analysed in their various dimensions, for thinking about the future. In a world of such extraordinary food disparity, it is necessary to ask what this reveals about current societies and what uncertainties and opportunities it entails. Scope and approach This commentary examines some paradoxes related to the global food system. When we consider where it is heading, multiple questions arise, for while this is apparently more productive than ever, it far from guarantees an inclusive, healthy and sustainable food supply for all. If, as is widely maintained, current food production is sufficient to feed the entire world population, we need to ask why food insecurity persists and, at the same time, why emerging diseases such as obesity have become a health problem on a global scale. Focusing on these growing trends in Spain, we discuss how they are linked to this system, their complex nature and possible ways of dealing with them. Key findings and conclusion The findings show how some of the positive trends engendered by the industrial food system, such as the progressive democratisation of food access and the reduction of social differences in food consumption, are now in retreat. The diagnosis we have presented on the increase in food insecurity and obesity alludes to profound changes in environments and lifestyles, but also to the social inequality produced by the impact of austerity policies. The paper postulates the need to transform structural factors in order to reverse these trends.

The evidence on the effectiveness of participatory development approaches in low-income countries is ambiguous. We randomly vary governance modalities to study elite capture in Ethiopian forest user groups and explore implications for livelihoods of group members. Top-down monitoring and punishment increases consumption and income, and decreases inequality. In contrast, internal monitoring has no effect on livelihoods. Additional heterogeneity analysis, based on observational data, reveals that while top-down monitoring works in groups where forest benefits are unimportant, internal monitoring improves economic outcomes in those groups where forest benefits are an important component of rural livelihoods. This suggests that participatory approaches work if targeted participants have strong incentives to voluntarily contribute effort.

Despite extensive discussion about the shape of post-pandemic trade recovery after the COVID-19 outbreak, no consensus has been reached Using 414 outbreaks as exogenous shocks from 1951 to 2015 and matching bilateral trade data, we find that outbreaks have a significant long-term negative impact on the export of affected countries The results show that it takes at least five years after the end of an epidemic for the export levels of affected countries to recover to the ex-ante average Our mechanism analysis shows that the prejudice generated by an outbreak has long-lasting adverse effects on exports Our heterogeneity analysis shows that the negative impact of epidemic prejudice on exports is more pronounced for trading partners with greater linguistic and cultural differences, weaker political ties, and larger income gaps Our findings contribute to understanding the post-pandemic global trade recovery process and validate behavioral economics and social psychology theories © 2021 Economic Society of Australia, Queensland