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.

Poland has experienced a very sharp rise in income and wealth inequality after the economic transition. We measure the relative persistence of income inequality and intra-generational income mobility in Poland during the period 2008-2015. Our research is based on the panel survey data, our subsample includes 501 households. To measure the persistence of income inequality we calculate Shorrocks’s R coefficient. We find that if inequality is measured by the Gini index the relative persistence of income inequality in Poland is similar to Western Europe. In the case of the Theil index and the Mean Log Deviation (MLD), the relative persistence is higher than in a majority of Western Europe countries and similar to the United Kingdom or the United States. The income distribution in Poland is rather stable. Income mobility is lowest at the bottom and at the top of the income distribution. In the middle (3rd) quintile upward mobility is higher than downward mobility. The short-term income mobility in Poland has not changed during and after the Great Financial Crisis and is still medium in comparison with the rest of Europe.

Population, as a fundamental element in urban development, often reflects a city's economic development pattern through its spatial distribution and dynamic changes. Studying population spatial distribution is pivotal for bolstering the economic activity capacity in urban agglomerations and guiding regional economic health. Using the Changsha-Zhuzhou-Xiangtan urban agglomeration as a case study, this paper analyzes its overall spatial structure and the spatiotemporal evolution of population at the district and county levels. This analysis utilizes population density, population redistribution index, and population geographic concentration as key indices. Additionally, a spatial econometric model is constructed to assess the impact of economic, social, and environmental factors on population spatial patterns. Findings reveal several key points: (1) Furong District serves as the primary central area, boasting a population geographic concentration of 25.1% in 2021. Tianxin District, Kaifu District, Yuhua District, Shifeng District, Yuelu District, and Hetang District constitute the secondary central areas, while Yutang District, Tianyuan District, Lusong District, Yuhu District, Wangcheng District, and Changsha County form the tertiary level areas. (2) Population density within the Changsha-Zhuzhou-Xiangtan urban agglomeration gradually decreases from Furong District outward. The first central area and sub-central areas experience increasing population density, highlighting a polarization trend in the population distribution. (3) The overall Moran's index for the spatial distribution of population in the Changsha-Zhuzhou-Xiangtan urban agglomeration is significantly positive, indicating a strong spatial autocorrelation and a deepening spatial agglomeration of population distribution. (4) Per capita disposable income, financial expenditure, and education level positively influence the geographical concentration of population in the urban agglomeration, while GDP per capita, road area per capita, and environmental quality exert a negative impact. Notably, the most influential factors shaping population spatial distribution are GDP per capita, disposable income per capita, and air quality.

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.

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.

This paper uses China Household Income Project rural household survey data spanning 30 years (1988-2018) to study the impact of China’s industrialization on rural household income. In the semiparametric regression model, we use the rural households’ distance to the manufacturing hub to analyze the spillover effect of industrialization on their income and the spatial attenuation. The results show that the income gap between rural households in Guangdong and other provinces increased from 1988 to 2002, but continuously decreased from 2002 to 2018; the rural households’ distance to the Pearl River Delta or the Yangtze River Delta, the two international manufacturing hubs, has a significant impact on their income, which has been increasing from 1988 to 1995, but has been decreasing since the new century. On the contrary, the influence of the rural households’ distance to the provincial capital on their income has been increasing since the new century.

The integration of digital technology and traditional finance has further achieved the goal of low-cost and sustainable financial services and contributed to high-quality economic development. Based on the data from 31 provinces in China from 2011 to 2021, this paper empirically analyzes the impact of digital finance on the urban-rural income gap. The results show that digital finance can significantly narrow the income gap between urban and rural residents. The quantile test shows that the greater the urban-rural income gap, the stronger the role of digital finance in narrowing the urban-rural income gap. The threshold effect test shows that the narrowing effect of digital finance on the urban-rural income gap will first increase and then weaken with the continuous improvement of the development level. Heterogeneity analysis shows that the secondary indicators of digital finance can significantly narrow the urban-rural income gap, and the effect of depth of usage is the most obvious. Moreover, digital finance has a significantly stronger effect on narrowing the urban-rural income gap in the eastern region than in other regions. Therefore, we should vigorously promote the development of digital finance and give full play to its effectiveness in narrowing the urban-rural income gap.

Non-labor income is a crucial factor influencing time allocation, and prior studies have primarily concentrated on the linear association between non-labor income and labor hours. Utilizing micro-survey data from the CFPS in 2018 and 2020 and employing the panel threshold model, this paper empirically identifies a double threshold with the wage rate as the threshold variable. This finding reveals a non-linear relationship between non-labor income and labor hours. The two thresholds categorize the relationship into three intervals. In the first interval, non-labor income significantly promotes labor hours, while in the second and third intervals, non-labor income significantly decreases labor hours, exhibiting slightly varying degrees of influence. In general, the relationship between non-labor income and labor hours demonstrates an irregular inverted U-shaped pattern. Upon dividing the workers in the sample into three groups based on the two thresholds, it is observed that wage rates exhibit a positive correlation with non-labor income.

The long-term low level of residents' property income is not only detrimental to the wealth accumulation of farmers, but also aggravates the urban-rural income imbalance. This paper uses an empirical approach to explore the mechanism of digital literacy's impact on farm households' property income. The main findings of this paper are as follows: (1) Digital literacy and its sub-dimensions can significantly increase the level of farmers' property income, with the strongest contribution of digital information acquisition literacy. (2) Digital literacy has a greater boosting effect on the property income of farm households with low education level heads, low physical capital households, and villages with better economic development. (3) Digital literacy increases the property income of farm households mainly through expanding social capital and improving risk preferences. The innovation of this paper is to construct a digital literacy evaluation index system based on a micro perspective that fits the behavioral characteristics of farmers, and reveal the impact and mechanism of digital literacy and its sub-dimensions on farmers' property income. This study expands the theoretical research related to digital literacy and farmers' property income, and provides a scientific basis for the choice of strategies to enhance the digital literacy of the majority of farmers, which is important for promoting wealth accumulation of farmers and achieving common prosperity.

The global financial crisis has affected all countries during the period 2007-2014. Tourist companies, especially in Italy, play a significant role in the economy of a country. The performance of tourism companies, and in particular hotels and travel agencies and tour operators, will be analysed in this paper, relative to the period of the crisis. The aim of this paper is to analyze profitability dynamics of the aforementioned tourist companies, to check whether they have suffered the effects of the global crisis. To this end, data from AIDA database relating to Italian companies in the sector were used. The profitability of these companies has been analyzed using the main profitability ratios, ROI and ROS ratios. An analysis of the trends and ANOVA of these ratios was carried out for the period 2007-2015. In this way, it has been verified whether the global crisis has affected profitability dynamics of hotels and travel agencies and tour operators in Italy. There is a parallelism in the trends of the main operators' indices in the three Italian macro-regions. The best performance is in the South, in a less developed economic context. The crisis has reduced the income indices in the first three years, even if the figure remains positive. Since 2012 there is a clear recovery, especially for hotels; intermediaries, on the other hand, suffer from competition from websites. However, the indices confirm the close relationship between travel agencies, tour operators and hotels. ROI mainly rewards first, while ROS intermediaries.

Global distributions of net factor income from abroad (NFI) during 1990-2019 have witnessed that (1) the United States is the top one country accounting for 40% of surpluses of the global total, while a surge in China’s deficit with its GDP increase; (2) GDP growth in emerging economies has a price scissors with NFI deficits; (3) asymmetric NFI has covered up the severity of rich countries’ global arbitrages especially from emerging economies; (4) China’s economic power is exaggerated by the PPP-based GDP implemented by the World Bank. It concludes that (1) developing countries have paid for huge hidden cost for their emergence; (2) the statement of the United States suffering losses absolutely does not hold; (3) GDP is not a universal tool for measuring what matters. It suggests that (1) emerging economies countries should beware of the potential misleading of GDP on economic measurement and economic power comparison ; (2) GDP should be critiqued from the applicability perspective of economies’ types; (3) it is urgent to clarify some misjudgment and misleading concepts in the economic affairs surrounding the global value chain patterns; (4) the construction of national governance capacity in emerging economies should focus on “social infrastructure”, of which one of the important parts is an effective economic statistics system; (5) emerging economies should carry out the strategic layout of international economic statistics talents to enhance their soft powers.

On the basis of the background of the global green development wave, this paper studies the mechanism between ecological value transformation and urban-rural common prosperity as well as selects 24 data indicators in relation to ecological value transformation, i.e., green development level from 2008 to 2017, calculate the comprehensive score of China's green development level by entropy method, measures the gap between the rich and the poor between urban and rural areas by urban-rural income ratio, and using correlation analysis, she examines the relationship between green development level and the urban-rural income ratio. Moreover, through empirical analysis, there is a significant negative correlation between the level of green development and the ratio of urban to rural income, according to the findings. The improvement of the level of green development will assist narrow the income gap between urban and rural residents as well as achieve common prosperity.

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.

How does democracy relate to the initial economic policy responses to Covid-19? Using a cross country analysis, we find that countries with a higher degree of democracy have stronger economic policy responses than their peers. However, when we separate monetary and financial policies from fiscal policy, democracy is not associated with the latter when we control for the income level of a country. Finally, for countries with lower levels of labor participation, high levels of income inequality are associated with weaker policy responses.

Based on the income poverty level differences and multi-dimensional poverty perspective in China, this paper compares the performance of education poverty alleviation, employment poverty alleviation, and industry poverty alleviation. The hypothesis was tested by quantile regression and ordered probit model. The results show that: in the short term, the effect of poverty alleviation through education is not significant; however, the effect of poverty alleviation through employment and industry is significant, increasing the income of poor households to a certain extent. The effect of poverty alleviation through employment is high. In the long term, the effect of poverty alleviation through industry is good. For the deep poor households, the effect of poverty alleviation through employment is more significant in the short term. For the marginal poor, only industry poverty alleviation has a significant effect on poverty alleviation. Education poverty alleviation and industry poverty alleviation are conducive to improving multi-dimensional poverty. In the alleviation of multi-dimensional poverty, employment poverty alleviation and education poverty alleviation have a certain synergy.

This paper deals with the gender gap in accessing and using financial services provided by mobile money and financial institutions. Using data from ECOWAS member countries, we applied the Fairlie decomposition method to estimate and decompose the gender gap. The results show that mobile money contributes to improving of the use of services compared to financial institutions. However, it also increases the gender gap in women's disadvantages in accessing and using these services. The difference in the level of education and income between males and females is the main factor explaining the gender gap.

In this work we aim to identify potential determinants and seek to predict terrorism attack. Thus, to eliminate uncertainty linked to explanatory variables we used the BMA method. We show that, contrary to expectations terrorism in MENA region is no longer purely of economic origin but mainly due to political problems, education, financial development and countries’ demographic characteristics. Likewise, we find that national, international and global terrorism are not of same origins even they present many common roots. In the end, we show that it is possible to predict majority of attacks based on a small number of indicators measuring political risk, financial development and income inequalities.

This study underscores the chronic issue of gender pay disparity that prevails across different STEM fields and educational qualification levels in Australia. Despite instances where women's incomes may align or even surpass men's, the broader pattern of inequality remains undeniable. The study advocates for targeted strategies to address gender pay gaps, particularly in fields like Engineering and Science, and emphasises the significance of cultivating inclusive work environments that recognise and reward contributions regardless of gender. This study serves as a critical call to action to rectify these inequities and promote a more balanced and equitable STEM landscape.

This study aims to examine the effects of student loan debt on the decisions of U.S. married households to invest in stocks located in non-retirement accounts. Using longitudinal datasets from the 2011 to 2017 U.S. Panel Study of Income Dynamics and a fixed effects logit model, the results show mixed findings. The presence of student debt decreases the probability that married households will own stocks, but the amount of student debt does not show a statistically significant effect. The findings suggest that the incidence of student debt raises the perception of liquidity constraints and debt burden among married households.