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We examined individual, regional, and cultural differences in household debts and identified residential mobility as a key socioecological variable at multiple levels of analysis. Study 1 found that American households' debt rates were higher than Japanese debt rates. Across 76 countries, household debts were higher in residentially mobile countries than those in residentially stable ones (Study 2). Next, across 144 U.S. cities, residents of residentially mobile cities had more credit card debts than those of residentially stable cities (Study 3). We further replicated the international and U.S. findings across 366 districts in India (Study 4). Study 5 found that American participants were more residentially mobile and more willing to borrow than Japanese participants, and the willingness to borrow was partly explained by the personal history of residential mobility. Study 6 found that residentially mobile individuals felt less indebtedness/gratitude than residentially stable individuals; the study also found how indebtedness/gratitude impacted individuals' credit card debts and willingness to borrow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Canadian households experienced unexpected changes in their economic well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic. The extent of the impact of the pandemic on household debt and its effect on health and mental health remains unknown. Aim: The aim of the study was to examine the associations of change in household debt due to COVID-19 with serious psychological distress (SPD) and general health measures. Methods: Data were from the 2020 Monitor study, a repeated cross-sectional survey of adults 18 years and older in Ontario, Canada. The 2020 cycle employed a web-based panel survey of 3,033 adults. The survey included measures of change in household debt due to the COVID-19 pandemic, mental and general health. Odds ratios (OR) were estimated from logistic regression models accounting for sociodemographic factors. Results: Overall, 17.5% of respondents reported that their household debt increased due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Such an increase in household debt was significantly associated with SPD (OR = 2.92, 95% CI, 2.05–4.16), fair/poor mental health (OR = 2.02, 95% CI, 1.59–2.56), frequent mental distress days (OR = 1.80, 95% CI, 1.31–2.48), fair/poor general health (OR = 1.93, 95% CI, 1.47–2.52), and suicidal ideation (OR = 3.71, 95% CI, 2.41–5.70) after adjusting for potential confounders including education, income and employment. Conclusions: Household debt during the COVID-19 pandemic is an important determinant of health. Individuals who reported an increase in household debt due to COVID-19 were more likely to report serious mental health concerns including suicidal ideation. This suggests that debt-related interventions may be needed to alleviate the adverse effects of indebtedness on health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Credit is ubiquitous in the life of Chilean households, the oldest neoliberal society. It is a key feature in the budgeting, shopping, and consuming practices of families. Consequently, to be indebted is a normal expectation in Chile. Families engage with the 'necessary evil' of credit in different ways, representing a massive, regular use of credit as short, medium and long-term leverage tools, with store cards being the main source of credit for lower and moderate income families in general. Moral obligations together with conventional and unconventional financial knowledge accompany the everyday situated economic practices of families. Addressing both the normalisation and the moralisation of credit, I attempt to make the case for the ongoing resignification of credit and debt and the evolving moral assessments of indebtedness, focusing on moderate and low-income households, namely those who embrace credit during recent decades. This article contributes to the discussion about the meaning of debt, to understand the financialisation of everyday life by looking at situated economic practices, and to recognise the social, moral and relational foundations of the economic practices. From the coming of the expansion of credit, households have learnt to deal with economic rationalities and internal and external moral judgements in order to justify their use of credit. Together with structural factors, this develops indebtedness assessments from detachment to naturalisation, placing credit and debt in the centre of 'decent life' expectations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Debt and time are inherently linked. In its essence, a debt is a quantified promise to pay at some point in the future. This article explores the temporal dimension of debt that manifests itself during the process of debt collection, the phase at which indebtedness becomes most tangible. Based on in-depth interviews and ethnographic fieldwork in the world of debt collection in Flanders, Belgium, we analyse how different temporal techniques used by 'street-level' debt collectors incite debtors to pay. Both in collection out of court by collection agencies as well as in judicial enforcement of the obligation to pay, debt collection imposes a strict schedule of repayment on the defaulting debtor. In this 'time regime' imposed upon debtors, payments are closely tracked, so that any deviation can be met by swift reminders and pecuniary punishment. The time regimes of debt collection can conflict with the temporal structures present in the everyday economic lives of the debtors. Incongruences appear due to frictions between the rhythm of repayment on the one hand, and temporal irregularities of the economic lives of debtors on the other. To further explore this time dimension, we also look at how debtors respond and adapt to the new temporal impositions, and how debt mediators deploy temporal strategies when assisting the over-indebted. By negotiating payment plans with creditors, debt mediators mitigate the harsher aspects of the time regime enacted through collection agencies and judicial officers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reappraises the meaning of space and place in contemporary class analysis. We explore how class is reshaped and mediated by neoliberal urban restructuring, of which the processes of gentrification and territorial stigmatization form critical parts. We focus on the contemporary interrelation of class and urban restructuring in the post-crash city by looking at the local lived experiences of the 2014 Commonwealth Games (CWG) in Glasgow's East End. This high-profile regeneration effort in a deprived working-class neighbourhood reveals much about the functions of neoliberal financial capitalism, austerity and contemporary class formation. We show that gentrification and territorial stigmatization work in tandem within urban regeneration policy interventions as a punitive strategy for managing poor populations. This involves land value and (de)valuing of people and creates new localized class inequalities and insecurities. Our research highlights that in the face of national level cuts and commodification, residents' local relations and support become essential social, economic and political resources. Yet, paradoxically, at the very same time, their local attachment to place is devalued, stigmatized and is at its most precarious. This exposes the coercive elements of the neoliberal class project; a distinct urban class inequality of our time and therefore, we suggest, a critical direction in class analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adversely affected by globalisation and state-based policy changes, India’s agricultural sector has recently experienced a marked increase in farmer suicides, most prominently in Andhra Pradesh (AP). This article examines the various policy changes leading to such agrarian distress and seeks to explore how the troubling phenomenon of farmers’ suicides may be curbed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Despite more than two decades since recognition of suicides by farmers in India, systematic studies comparing various risk factors are lacking. This is major hurdle for the formulation of strategies for farmers' suicide prevention. Objective: To identify socioeconomic and psychological risk factors and their relative contribution in suicides by farmers. Materials and Methods: A matched case-control psychological autopsy was done on 98 farmers' suicide victims and 98 controls in Central India. Results: Economic problems, psychiatric illness, and stressful life events were found to be important contributors to farmers' suicides. Important economic risk factors were procurement of debt, especially from multiple sources and for nonagricultural reasons and leasing out farms. Psychiatric illness was present significantly in higher proportion among cases than controls. Crop failure, interpersonal problems, medical illness, and marriage of female family member were significant stressful life events. Conclusions: There are socioeconomic and psychological risk factors for suicide by farmers which can be targets of prevention policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a result of the dramatic growth in functional decentralization processes in Portuguese municipalities, this study examines public services delivery in the 308 Portuguese local governments existing in 2011. By using Biplot analyses, the aim of this study is to analyse the Portuguese functional decentralization processes by population ranges and service type. The results show that functional decentralization is more often used in the largest cities, mainly because of the need to meet citizens' demands and moreover, the opportunistic use by politicians since they could transfer part of the expenditure and debt to these newly created agencies. In addition, the results show that water, urban planning, cultural and economic services are the most decentralized. By contrast, decentralized agencies are not used for the provision of health services in any municipality, and protection, social and environment services are decentralized in very few municipalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study uses panel regression tests to examine the impact of the economic performance on the financial one. The retained measures for the economic performance and the financial one are, respectively, the operational efficiency score estimated with data envelopment analysis and the return on assets. This investigation leads to four major conclusions. First, the test results confirm that hotel financial performance is linked to its economic performance that is evaluated by its technical efficiency. Second, hotels affiliated to an international chain, hotels operating under a franchise contract, and hotels located in coastal areas or situated in scenic areas present a better financial performance than others. Third, the managers’ high intellectual level positively affects financial performance. However, hotel size and indebtedness have negative impacts. Fourth, hotel financial performance is linked to its contextual factors such as the tourism region attractiveness. Finally, this study ensures the significant impact of national and international crises, such as terrorist attacks on hotel financial performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 'financially incontinent citizen' is a recent phenomenon and is increasingly the focus of policy-makers: international, national and local as well as the financial services industry. The social construction of the financially profligate consumer-citizen was produced in the merger of social democratic and neoliberal discourses in political economy as well as the success of neoliberalism in aligning itself with media and public consensus. This paper (1) provides an examination of the production of the profligate citizen in neoliberal policy-making and reveals the more recent roles behavioural economics and psychology have had in developing the means to define behavioural standards and guidelines to remedy the 'defective autonomy' of consumer-citizens; and (2) argues a sociological counter-position drawing on the recent turn to pragmatist theories of social action, and empirical studies, that emphasize the forms of social creativity and innovation that actors in rapidly changing lifecourse scenarios develop. The complexity of the lifecourse can also be too challenging, but the remedy is not the remediation of a 'defective' actor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taken together, Robert Putnam’s work on the decline of social capital (2000) and Juliet Schor’s insights about the rise of “the new consumerism” (1999) suggest a shift in values in which our responsibilities as citizens have taken a backseat to our desires as consumers. This article complicates this shift in civic and consumer culture by examining generational differences in overconsumption, competitive consumption, and conscious consumption between 1994 and 2004. Using survey proxies for these concepts from the annual DDB Needham Life Style Study, the authors find that Generation X exhibits the highest rates of overconsumption and competitive consumption while also displaying the lowest rates of conscious consumption. Notably, the trends for these three aspects of consumer behavior vary in terms of overtime stability, general tendency, and economic responsiveness. These differing patterns of spending and consumption have far-reaching implications for society as a whole, particularly as the Civic Generation fades, the Boomers move out of the workforce, and Generation X becomes mature and culturally dominant. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article, an attempt has been made to understand the morbidity pattern and its burden on the households while seeking health care in the rural areas of Gujarat. The findings suggest a high burden of illness in the rural population which often entails substantial expenditure on treatment. Inadequate public health provisions have led to greater dependence on private health services across the various income groups. However, as proportion of expenditure on health is inversely related to the annual income of the household, poor households have to incur much greater share of income expenditure on health than the better-off households. Cost of treatment being high, a significant proportion of households is vulnerable to debt in managing the expenses on major health problems. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A robust finding in compliance-seeking message effects research is that providing an unsolicited favor to a target before making a direct request for compliance is more effective than a direct request alone. Explaining this effect, however, has proven a more elusive goal. Most existing studies either do not examine potential mediators of the favor-compliance relationship or restrict their focus to one or two potential mediators. In this study, the authors extend compliance research by testing five potential explanations for the favor-compliance relationship and examine the relationship in an untested context, a cross-sex date request. We also examine the impact of another important predictor of compliance, socioeconomic status (SES). Findings suggest that favor and SES interact to affect compliance with a date request and that the positive affective mechanisms of gratitude, liking, and physical attraction best explain these effects. Implications for understanding human reciprocal behavior and its explanatory mechanisms are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]