Numerous studies have explored the impact of family planning policies on income distribution, but the impact of policy relaxation remains largely unexplored. To address this gap, we investigate the effects of China's selective two-child policy, which was implemented in 2013, using provincial panel data from 2011 to 2016. Specifically, we employ a generalized difference-in-differences model to empirically analyze the impact and mechanism of the policy relaxation on residents' income distribution. Our findings are as follows. Firstly, the selective two-child policy has narrowed the income distribution gap. Secondly, male labor force participation, the urban-rural income gap, and disposable income serve as mechanisms through which the selective two-child policy affects income distribution. Thirdly, the robustness test confirms the robustness of our conclusions. Finally, we observe regional heterogeneity in the impact of the selective two-child policy on residents' income distribution. Specifically, the policy has had significant effects in the western and northeastern regions, but not in other regions. Overall, our results shed light on the impact of childbearing policies on income distribution, providing important insights for optimizing China's childbearing policies and promoting common prosperity.

This study analyses the effects of piped water on household food consumption per capita by adopting inverse-probability-weighted regression adjustment and endogenous treatment effects approaches with data from the Cambodia Socio-Economic Survey carried out in 2013 and 2017. A complementary analysis of the effects on primary household income per working-age member is also conducted to give insights into the potential consequences. The study also conducts a robustness check by estimating the fixed effects of piped water utilising village panel data. The results suggest that households using piped water are likely to enjoy higher food consumption per capita, with a complementary finding demonstrating that the use of piped water is likely to increase household income per working-age member.

This paper examines impacts of China’s financial liberalization policy on income inequality, through three channels: financial scale, financial structure and financial efficiency, an empirical analysis based on panel data of 30 provinces in China from 1996 to 2013 is conducted. The results confirm the Kuznets effect between financial scale, financial structure and income inequality. As the size of the financial sector expands, the financial structure is tilted toward direct financing, and the income gap among residents will experience a "reverse U-shaped" trend that rises first and then falls. Most of China has not yet passed the turning point, and is still in the upper bound of the "inverted U-shaped" curve. Financial liberalization policies will continue to exacerbate income inequality. The impact of financial efficiency on income distribution is quite different in different regions of China. After dividing the whole China into three regions according to the degree of economic development, it is found that the financial efficiency of the eastern and western regions has a Kuznets effect on the income gap, but compared with the eastern region, more provinces and cities in the western region have entered the stage of reducing the income inequality, and the financial development has a great impact on the western region. The effects of financial development on central China are weak, and income inequality increases with financial efficiency.

This research paper investigates the policy impact of tariff, interest rate, and political stability on balance of payments among three income groups classified by the World Bank. The global panel data is taken from the World Bank from 2002 to 2022 and divided into three groups based on the classification on per capita income into High Income, Upper middle income, and Lower middle-income countries. This study explores how these variables impact balance of payments in different economic conditions and if their impact is different. The study employed in this paper is the Panel Least Squares, Fixed Effects Regression, GMM and Dumitrescu panel granger causality tests. The findings do confirm that these variables indeed have unlike impacts in the selected groups and the importance of tariff and interest rate as a policy tool cannot be sidelined. This research contributes to a deeper understanding of the complex relationship between macroeconomic variables within each income group also highlighting the importance of political stability for economic outlook.

The Human Development Index (HDI) aims to present a more robust picture of a country’s development status than that suggested by national income per capita. The HDI aggregates dimension indices based on transformed measures for the core values of health, education, and income per capita. Assumptions are made regarding the upper and lower bounds used to re-scale each core value into its dimension index, as well as the functional form used to create the HDI. The treatment of income in the HDI’s construction suggests incompatibilities with its underlying capability theory, which stresses the importance of individuals’ abilities to make their own consumption and life choices. We examine the currently formulated HDI, as well as two influential proposed alternatives which generalize the aggregation functions of the pre-2010 HDI formulation and the current HDI, in light of recent empirical research into the relationship between well-being and income. We use underlying data for 2016, a representative year, to examine distributional changes as well as specific country rankings. We find that the income bounds used to calculate the income dimension index in the HDI should be changed. We also suggest that the three aggregation formulations, along with prominent descriptions of the assumptions and consequent implications of each approach, should be disseminated for policymakers and the public to consider.

The digital economy industry plays a transformative role in reshaping the global production networks, the local division of production, and the integration and innovation of business forms. However, to what extent the industry enables the high-quality development and upgrading of urban economies is unclear. Based on the census data of digital economy enterprises in Hangzhou in 2008, 2013 and 2018, this paper verifies the characteristics of the digital economy industry and its enabling mechanism for high-quality urban economic development. It is found that: firstly, the digital economy industry has three main forms for the economy, namely, the sharing, scale and scope economy. Secondly, the industry has four major mechanisms to improve the quality of urban economies. That is, it can restructure the global industrial division of labor and value chains, promote the transformation of scale economy from the supply side to the demand side, enable the softening and servitization of industrial structure, and generate the scale of economies. This paper thus contributes to understanding the evolution of enterprise organizational structure and industrial competitiveness and the endogenous technological change under the digital economy.

The high price of energy due to green energy policy will cause adjustments across the US economy predicted in the present general equilibrium model that includes energy Btu input with capital and labor to produce manufactures and services. This same model in trade theory examines the effects of a tariff on an imported factor of production such as a natural resource or capital.  Corresponding error correction estimates of the reduced form equations of the model in annual 1970-2018 data prove robust and suggest model modifications. A parametric approach to noncompetitive pricing based on unit cost diminishing with output brings the model much closer to the estimates. Manufactures are revealed to have a higher degree of noncompetitive pricing than services. Assuming constant elasticity of substitution production, a weak degree is revealed to provide the best fit to the error correction estimates. The high price of green energy will cause an inelastic decrease in energy input resulting in increased energy revenue. Outputs of both sectors fall, more in manufactures due to its energy intensity. The capital return and wage also fall given the weak substitution of capital and labor relative to the price of energy. The wage rises slightly in the model but falls considerably in the error correction estimate. The only clear winner is energy input with increased revenue. The government owns a large share of hydrocarbon reserves and will benefit from a higher price of energy.

This study investigates the impact of institutions and public agricultural Research and Development (R&D) on agricultural productivity in low- and middle-income countries. The paper employs panel data with fixed-effects models, spanning 12 years and including 49 low-and middle-income countries. Agricultural productivity is measured by cereal yield, while institutional factors are assessed through four key indicators: judicial independence, property rights protection, contract enforcement, and impartial public administration. Public agricultural R&D investments serve as the measure for agricultural R&D. The findings show that property rights protection positively influences agricultural productivity, whereas legal contract enforcement has a negative impact across these countries. Additionally, public agricultural R&D significantly and positively affect productivity in Asia and the LAC regions, but not in sub-Saharan Africa.

We study analytically the conflict of goals between stabilizing economic activity and public debt sustainability, for the fiscal authorities. In the short run, an active and expansionary fiscal policy, increasing public investment or reducing the labor taxation rate, is growth enhancing. However, as these short term fiscal policies also decrease government revenue and increase the public debt, budgetary and fiscal multipliers are reduced in the long run. In the framework of a potential ZLB constraint for monetary policy, an expansionary fiscal policy is thus appropriate only if long term labor and consumption taxation rates are small, and if the share of public expenditure in GDP is high. On the contrary, fiscal policy should be contractionary, in order to insure the sustainability of the long term public debt, if long term labor and consumption taxation rates are high. A contractionary fiscal policy is then also all the more appropriate as the sensitivity of government expenditure to the public debt is high, and as the labor share in the production function is high.

Many of Keynes´s ideas and concepts are proven correct in this paper. The demand side, mainly business investments, drives the economy. Business firms steer the business cycle via profit expectations and animal spirits. Injections to and withdrawals from the circular flow of income are multiplied throughout the economy in accordance with Keynes´s multiplier. A sudden and sharp rise in households´ saving rates has a detrimental effect on aggregate demand, in line with Keynes´s paradox of thrift. Finance, not saving in the S=I sense, is the necessary condition for business investments and economic growth to be realized. Keynes´s finance motive thus makes money endogenous, contradicting the textbook result that exogenous money steers aggregate demand, contradicting the mainstream loanable funds theory and putting into question the Keynesian theory of sticky prices as a condition for real growth. However, a crucial omission in Keynes´s productive writings is the lack of an accelerator tying income to investment. Some of his followers such as Paul Samuelson tried to remedy that by developing multiplier-accelerator models. The problem with them is that the accelerator lacks micro foundations, in specific disregarding business confidence. Linking macro accounting identities with empirical national accounts data for five major economies produces the finding that business firms explain more than all aggregate expenditure growth during a 25-year period. Thus, it is concluded that business confidence is the root of the business cycle. Making the accelerator account for business confidence casts new light on the perhaps most well-known Keynesian “truth”: active fiscal policy as a main force stabilizing the business cycle. With business confidence being the endogenous and ubiquitous variable driving the business cycle, it turns out that any exogenous factor has the possibility to affect it. Policy needs to be viewed as a competing factor to the factor(s) driving the cycle in the other, destabilizing direction. The more powerful those factors are (e.g., a deadly virus), the tougher it gets for policy to “win” the competition, turning business confidence around. This leads up to the paper´s main conclusion: the worse the economy, the stronger is the case for active fiscal policy, but the lesser is the chance for it to succeed.

Economic growth rests on entrepreneurship and capitalism. Entrepreneurship is important because entrepreneurs work unceasingly to create, use, and disseminate new products and productive techniques to raise living standards. Capitalism is characterized by private property rights, a free market, and the pursuit of profit, which are driving forces for innovation and productivity and in turn economic growth. Using six proxies for economic growth, our results show that capitalism, measured by the Economic Freedom of the World Index, and entrepreneurship, measured by the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor data set, fostered economic growth in member states of the European Union between 2000 and 2021.

The very nature of work, labor market composition, and skill requirements are severely affected by technology-driven transformations currently underway with the 4^th industrial revolution (4IR). The effect of 4IR technologies on technical and vocational education and training (TVET) and the contribution of TVET to the labor market is explicit. The paper presents the findings of a study that investigated whether TVET institutions are prepared to face the challenges of 4IR. The data for the study were collected by surveying 428 teachers from 15 countries in Asia and the Pacific engaged in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields at the tertiary level. The findings of our study undoubtedly bring greater attention to the initiatives of TVET in these countries in preparing the workforce for job roles necessitated in the 4IR. The findings can also be used to frame policy recommendations for the growth of economies.

This paper presents an operational framework for assessing the trajectories of production, energy, emissions, and capital accumulation to ensure the implementation of Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). The framework combines widely used methodologies (STIRPAT, system dynamics, and optimization) to simulate the pathways of variables until a target year. The CO-STIRPAT dynamic system allows us to identify the spillover pathways from carbon policy to economic growth based on output optimization principles; to conduct a more systematic analysis of the interconnections between the main drivers that determine carbon emissions; to develop a cost-effective climate policy mix that is a backbone for the right combination of carbon pricing, energy efficiency, and carbon intensity; and to assess NDC targets with respect to ambition gaps, implementation gaps, and feasibility.

Green-biased technological progress takes into account the influence of energy input and pollution emissions, which is of great significance to China's green development. This paper decomposes technological progress into two categories: green input-biased technological progress (IBTC) and green output-biased technological progress (OBTC), using the Slacks-based measure integrating (SBM) model. The factor bias in technological progress is determined based on data from 34 industries in China from 2000 to 2015. The results show that green-biased technological progress exists significantly in the industry, and most of it promotes the growth of green total factor productivity. IBTC first tends to consume energy to pursue capital between capital input and energy input, while it tends to save energy after the Eleventh Five-Year Plan. Between labor input and energy input, it is biased towards saving labor and consuming resources. OBTC is biased towards promoting industrial growth and curbing pollution emissions. Medium and light-polluting industries are biased toward promoting industrial growth and curbing pollution emissions, while heavy-polluting industries are biased towards emitting more pollution.

Less-Lethal Weapons, including electric Tasers, velocity-reduction bullet-capture projectiles, rubber bullets, beanbag rounds, and other less-lethal projectiles used in police departments, federal and local law enforcement agencies, and military policing operations, as well as for private use, are topics of significant debate in recent years. These weapons can reduce collateral damage, reputational risk, and legal exposure while preventing wrongful and unnecessary deaths caused by conventional bullet wounds. Yet, opponents have highlighted concerns regarding the safety and effectiveness of these weapons, as well as their potential to cause injury or even death. While the primary duty of law enforcement officials is to preserve order and execute the law while protecting individual rights, they ultimately achieve these goals by exercising their coercive authority. Society expects police officers to rely on their professional training and judgment when using physical force to defend citizens and themselves or to apprehend criminal suspects. Because police officers must occasionally participate in physical acts of coercion, it is unavoidable that some of these interactions may result in bodily injuries to individuals, including the officers themselves. These injuries have real costs, such as medical treatment, lost wages, municipal liability, court claims and settlements, riots, and legal or even criminal exposure, as well as less-tangible collateral costs, such as the erosion of police legitimacy and public trust, which are more difficult to quantify but arguably more influential in shaping long-term public perceptions than personal injuries alone. Less lethal technology eliminates some of the concerns raised by lethal weaponry. This study reviews the advantages and disadvantages of these less-lethal weapon technologies versus traditional firearms for use by the police force, federal agencies, and military police while also performing advanced analytics to model the valuation and return on investment for a law enforcement organization implementing such technologies.

Trust beneficiary protection constitutes an important legal system in the trust industry. This paper, based upon the study approach of the “Theory of Law and Finance”, establishes the trust beneficiary protection index of China. We also test the influence of trust beneficiary protection on the performance of trust companies. As indicated by our study’s results, an “inverted U-shaped” relationship exists between the degree of trust beneficiary protection and the performance of trust companies. In a period when the trust law system has not yet been well established, strengthening trust beneficiary protection could help facilitate the growth of trust company performance. However, this facilitation effect gradually diminishes as the trust law system becomes more perfect. This in turn means that, after reaching a certain peak, conferring the beneficiary with more rights of supervision and participation would cause the performance of trust companies to decline. Improving regional legal environments could also help facilitate the growth of trust company performance. In addition, this facilitation effect is subject to the influence of the nature of trust company controllers. In trust companies controlled by local state-owned capitals, we find that the facilitation effect of the improvement of regional legal environments on trust company performance is inhibited. In trust companies controlled by non-state-owned capitals, however, the facilitation effect of the improvement of regional legal environments on trust company performance is enhanced.

Income and population growth are key determinants of housing demand, while land use regulations are designed to affect housing supply. Previous studies of housing price determinants focus either on specific regulations in particular cities/regions, or on selective subsets of major cities and regulations. This study examines the impact of land use regulations on housing prices from 1989 to 2006 in an unusually large sample of 250 major US cities. Aside from factors that are commonly associated with housing demand (income, population growth and density), housing prices are found to be associated with local cost-increasing land use regulations (approval delays) and with statewide regulations. Since statewide regulations factor prominently into the results, specific examples of the impact of different types of land use regulations are provided for 5 cities in the state of Washington. The estimated increase in housing prices associated with regulations is, on average (over 250 cities), substantially larger than the effects of income and population growth. While the estimated dollar costs associated with regulations may be sizable at times, the results are remarkably consistent with previous studies that were based on smaller cross sections.

In this study, I analyze the impact of the aggregate, income, corporate and social security tax revenues on both the U.S. output and the stock market return in a structural vector autoregression (SVAR) framework between 1960:Q1 and 2015:Q4. Unlike some of the other studies, I use aggregate and disaggregated tax revenue variables to examine the impact of scal policy. Results show that an increase in aggregate tax revenue reduces output and market return. In addition, an increase in income, corporate, and social security tax revenues reduces output and the market return signi cantly at varying degrees.

Keeping in view the concept of agglomeration economies and the New Economic Geography (NEG) angle, this paper makes an attempt to examine the rural to urban population movement at the district level in India. The findings do not favour a strong positive association between levels of urbanization and migration rates.  However, there exists a cluster of districts which are able to attract migrants on a large scale in spite of being already urbanized. The work participation rate, share of services and construction work, and literacy rate all form parts of this positive nexus, indicating that opportunities exist with increased levels of urbanization which in turn prompt people to migrate. The positive spill-over effects of higher levels of urbanization are not limited to the urban spaces only as the adjoining rural areas also seem to have undergone   a significant transformation. The land use pattern and activities are changing and some of the developmental impact is evident. However, the regional variations in this respect are evident. There are sharp differences in the relationship between urbanization level and migration rates across regions. The nature of urbanization and its determinants and the outcome variables of urbanization and migration also unravel regional variations. Besides, there are many districts with higher levels of urbanization; yet, they are not able to attract migrants at a rapid pace. New investment opportunities can be created in these spaces to reduce the cost of growth and make employment generation process more effective, facilitating the rural population to take the benefits of agglomeration economies.

The fast-paced evolution of the business world today requires business players to work diligently to maintain their competitive advantage. To enhance a company's competitive edge, strategic business planning is essential. A well-developed business strategy allows a company to achieve the best market position, improve sales performance, and define approaches to gain a competitive advantage. CV Cita Nasional, a company located in Indonesia that manufactures a pasteurized milk, faces business strategy issues, including declining revenue. This study aims to analyze the internal factors using value chain analysis and external factors using PESTEL Analysis, followed by the formulation of business strategies through SWOT Analysis, and the establishment of strategic priorities using QSPM. Data for this research were collected through interviews and questionnaires, with participation from stakeholders including the plan manager, production and quality control managers, administrative and personnel manager, finance and treasury manager, production and quality control supervisors, production process supervisor, and purchasing and warehouse supervisor. The internal factor analysis using value chain analysis revealed 29 strengths and 7 weaknesses, while the external factor analysis using PESTEL identified 11 opportunities and 8 threats. The strategy formulation using the SWOT matrix resulted in 7 alternative strategies, including 2 SO strategies, 2 WO strategies, 2 ST strategies, and 1 WT strategy. The QSPM method was used to prioritize strategies, with Strategy 1 ("Maintaining the stability of current product prices and improving product quality") achieving the highest value.