This article examines Brazil's free psychoanalytic clinics as radical experiments in what I callsanitary emancipation-a mode of mental health care production that links wellbeing to liberation from colonial oppression. Based on ethnographic research with clinical collectives in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and beyond, I argue that these grassroots initiatives mobilise a "corruptive" form of emancipation: an imperfect, materially entangled refusal of purity that emerges from a discipline (psychoanalysis) marked by elitist and patriarchal histories. Through practices ofterritorial listening-offering sessions in breadlines, public squares and sites of racist police violence-these clinics reimagine care in ways that directly challenge the coloniality of power, knowledge and being embedded in Global Mental Health paradigms. Situated within Brazil's post-Psychiatric Reform landscape, clinics like Coletivo Pontes da Psicanálise (with its Afro-Brazilianescuta de giraapproach) and Margens Clínicas (working in territories scarred by state violence) and several others confront DSM-driven diagnostic logic as a neo-colonising discourse under financial capitalism. Their work critically fulfils the promise of the medical humanities by, first, politicising care as acommonsrather than a commodified service; second, fostering situated knowledges grounded in relational and territorial forms of alienation; and third, resisting the de-politicised metrics of global health epidemiology. These unfinished, situated experiments in street psychoanalysis and anti-racist care ethics reveal both radical potential and inevitable capitalist contamination. Ultimately, they offer a compelling model for rethinking mental health through insurgent, place-based and decolonial frameworks.

ABSTRACT Recent US election cycles have revealed a startling bifurcation in the political allegiances of finance capitalism. The current configuration of alliances places one faction of finance capital, consisting of private equity, hedge funds and venture capital, firmly on the side of the Trumpian GOP, while the other faction, extending to mutual and index fund managers, has become increasingly dependent on the Democrats' policy agenda. By tracing the evolution of New Deal securities law in the 1980s and beyond, this article seeks to explain how this organisational and factional divide fell into place and what it tells us about the evolving commitments of Democrats and Republicans respectively.

In the highly climate- and ecology-sensitive eastern margin of the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau (QTP), understanding the adaptation behaviors of agro-pastoralists is crucial for reconfiguring human–climate–ecosystem interactions. However, existing studies often overlook the bounded rationality of micro-level decision-makers. Based on behavioral decision theory, this study constructs a “Perception–Capital–Adaptation” analytical framework. Utilizing micro-survey data from 890 agro-pastoralist households and employing Multinomial Logit (MNL) and Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) models, this paper systematically explores how environmental risk perception and livelihood capital are jointly associated with livelihood strategy choices and land-use behaviors. The findings reveal that (1) risk perception exhibits significant heterogeneity: sudden risks show a strong association with risk-avoidance transitions, whereas gradual risks often manifest as traditional livelihood lock-in due to “cognitive lag.” (2) The moderation of capital exhibits non-linear characteristics: physical and natural capital correspond to path dependence on existing production, while financial capital may be associated with expansionary behaviors, reflecting “maladaptation” in specific contexts. (3) Their interaction corresponds to a duality of adaptation pathways: a coordinated pathway (balancing ecological conservation and livestock reduction) and a conflictive pathway (maintaining production scale). Accordingly, a “risk-capital” trade-off matrix is constructed to identify four typical adaptation patterns: risk-avoidance transformation, path-dependent persistence, resilience-driven expansion, and fragile maintenance. This study demonstrates that climate adaptation essentially reflects the dynamic trade-offs made by boundedly rational actors between cognitive constraints and capital structures, providing a novel micro-behavioral perspective for avoiding maladaptation.

ABSTRACT: This study analyzes the financial strength and capital structure of ten selected top pharmaceutical companies in India over the five-year period FY 2020-21 to FY 2024-25. Using secondary data from published annual reports, BSE filings, and financial databases, the study employs seventeen financial ratios spanning profitability, liquidity, efficiency, solvency, and capital structure dimensions. Comparative statistical techniques including hierarchical cluster analysis (Ward's method), Pearson's correlation analysis, and simple linear regression analysis are applied using R software (Version 4.6). The findings reveal that companies maintaining conservative, equity-dominated capital structures—namely Abbott India, Ajanta Pharma, Divi's Laboratories, Alkem Laboratories, and Pfizer—consistently achieved superior financial performance across all dimensions. Hierarchical cluster analysis grouped the ten companies into three distinct financial profiles based on their leverage and profitability characteristics. Regression analysis confirmed that a one-unit increase in the Debt-to-Equity Ratio reduces Return on Assets (ROA) by 13.443 units and Return on Equity (ROE) by 6.826 units. The correlation analysis reveals a moderate negative relationship between leverage and ROA (r = -0.5887). Although statistical significance was marginal due to the small sample size, the overall evidence strongly indicates that lower leverage is associated with stronger financial performance in the Indian pharmaceutical industry. KEYWORDS: Capital Structure, Financial Performance, Leverage, Pharmaceutical Industry, India, Ratio Analysis, Cluster Analysis, Regression Analysis.

This study qualitatively explores the lived experiences of people with disabilities in the workplace in Wolkite Town, Ethiopia, through the lens of a sustainable livelihood approach (framework). Although there is a growing interest across existing studies on employment barriers for people with disabilities, few studies have examined how the interplay of social, human, and financial barriers shapes workplace experiences in low-resource urban settings. This phenomenological study involved key informants and in-depth interviews with 30 participants to investigate the challenges faced by people with disabilities in the workplace, the social and livelihood resources they mobilize, and the coping mechanisms they wield. Three main themes emerged from the study: difficulties in the workplace, social and livelihood resources, and coping mechanisms. The results of the study highlight widespread structural and attitudinal obstacles, such as discrimination in the workplace, lack of accessible infrastructure, social stigma, and institutional negligence, which contribute to poor access to human, social, physical, and financial capital. Regardless of these limitations, people with disabilities can be resilient, although they do not react to these challenges without adaptive coping strategies including cognitive reframing, social network dependence, and problem engagement. When the voices of people with disabilities are central, this study will provide context-specific knowledge to guide interventions that put the perspective of disabled individuals at the center of livelihood interventions and offer equitable employment opportunities in low-resource locations.

Global debt distress is a crisis of unprecedented severity, affecting fifty-four countries and 3.2 billion people. United Nations agencies estimate that interest payments on external debt far exceed public expenditure on health and education. During this catalytic moment, this special issue presents feminist political economy perspectives linking debt at the national level to the household level, and both to the unequal architecture of international finance capital. The multiplication of predatory forms of careless lending – the other side of “financial inclusion” – emerges as a key mechanism through which crises facing capital are converted into crises of social reproduction for labor, displaced from capitalist center to periphery, and onto the bodies of women, men, and children. This special issue illuminates how debt, distress, and defiance sit on a continuum offering political hope and the will from “below” to visibilize the invisible: namely, the colonial, ecological, and reproductive debts underpinning financial capitalism. HIGHLIGHTS Debt crises in the Global South reflect inequalities in global finance. Feminist analysis highlights the gendered and unequal burdens of sovereign debt. Debt drives financial flows from the Global South to the Global North. Reform must move beyond debt cancellation to address colonial, ecological, and reproductive debts.

ABSTRACT This article argues that the rise of financial capitalism and the development of digital infrastructures have had a profound and still insufficiently theorized effect on the political economy of attention in the cultural industries. Specifically, attention has become an asset for technological platforms through the quantification and management of user-generated data. This is a significant shift from previous conceptualizations of attention as (a) a commodity waiting to be exchanged or (b) a form of nontransferable capital held by well-known brands or people. Drawing on literature about the assetization of data, I argue that the economy of attention can also be understood through logics of accumulation and the creation of future income streams. At the same time, attention data is different from other data assets considering the unique labor relations through which it is produced. Furthermore, the economization of attention has already been shown to have deep sociocultural consequences. The financial and technological move toward attention assetization also has important symbolic and moral ramifications. The final part of the article explores some of these implications, like the increased cultural value of popularity and the delegitimation of other forms of worth in contemporary societies.

ABSTRACT We examine whether and when ESG capital is associated with operating value creation and how its effects depend on other capitals emphasized in the Integrated Reporting lens. Using a large cross-country panel with firm-year ESG data, we model nonlinearity and cross-capital interactions and evaluate both contemporaneous and multi-year operating outcomes. Results show a clear nonlinear ESG – performance association: the largest gains arise when firms move from very low to mid-range ESG, with benefits that continue but flatten at higher levels. Crucially, ESG appears to act as a complement to other resources. Under stronger financial capital, ESG’s association with operating performance is larger; under richer intellectual capital, ESG is more strongly linked to the translation of knowledge into results; and with better manufacturing capital, ESG aligns with process and asset-utilization improvements. Component analysis indicates diminishing returns for the environmental dimension, small stand-alone effects for social, and governance effects that become economically meaningful when paired with other capitals. Effects persist over one-, three-, and five-year horizons and are robust to alternative performance measures and sample splits. Managerially, the evidence supports calibrating ESG investment and integrating it with financial discipline, capability development, and operational upgrades.

Purpose: This study evaluates the reasons for the failure of technological interventions to foster community resilience within the “Sampah Terkelola, Lingkungan Terjaga” program in Bulusan Village. Research Methodology: Using a qualitative case study, data were gathered through participant observation (July–August 2025), semi-structured interviews, and document analysis. The Community Capitals Framework (CCF), participation theory, and knowledge co-production served as primary diagnostic lenses. Results: Findings indicate that while the program bolstered built and human capital through infrastructure, it neglected financial and political capital. This imbalance, driven by top-down planning and the lack of a revenue model, led to the immediate stagnation of the local Waste Bank post-intervention. Conclusions: Sustainable waste management requires a shift in focus from technology transfer to the co-production of managerial knowledge and the institutionalization of governance structures that balance all community capital. Limitations: This study is restricted to a short-term qualitative assessment of a single village and lacks longitudinal data. Contributions: This research advances the environmental sociology and rural development literature by establishing the CCF as a critical evaluative tool for predicting the institutional durability of community-based interventions. This explicitly demonstrates that social capital integration is a prerequisite for, rather than a byproduct of, technological success in waste management.

Although recovery is a central tenet of the US substance use disorder service delivery system, empirical research on youth recovery remains limited and underdeveloped. Notably, no population-based representative surveys, either in the United States or internationally, currently assess recovery status among secondary school-aged youth (aged 14-18 years). Consequently, little is known about how many youth identify as being in recovery or about their characteristics and needs. This study presents the first statewide representative estimate of adolescent self-reported recovery (ASR), derived from a large Midwestern state in the United States. We used data from the 2024 Illinois Youth Survey, a weighted, statewide representative survey of students from 8th, 10th, and 12th grades across Illinois. We examined the prevalence of ASR with a widely used single-item question, "Do you consider yourself to be in recovery?" The question was presented after an instruction directing students to consider only substance use when responding. We estimated the prevalence of ASR and conducted descriptive analyses to characterize this group. Among the 6871 participating students from the 10th and 12th grades, the prevalence of ASR was 3.3% (95% CI 2.6%-4.1%). Among participants with ASR, 51.1% (118/231) were female, 39% (90/231) identified as Latino or Latina, 38.1% (88/231) identified as White, and 13% (30/231) identified as Black or African American. The average age of participants with ASR was 16.5 (SD 1.14) years. Participants with ASR were demographically diverse, and a little over half received free or reduced-price lunch. Findings suggest that financial recovery capital may be particularly important for participants with ASR. This study provides the first population-based estimate of the prevalence of ASR and underscores the importance of including recovery status in large-scale surveys to inform and strengthen recovery support systems.

Since the 1980s, international financial monopoly capital has adopted neoliberalism as a pragmatic tool in political games and an ideological instrument for unifying public opinion. This has allowed a certain number of private operators to extend their control over the broadest possible range of social resources and structures, thereby achieving the optimal solution for individual interests. In contrast, the vulnerability of the lives of the poor and weak at the bottom of the wealth pyramid has intensified day by day. When the logic of capital pushes beyond ethics and law to an extreme, it gives rise to the deformed state of necrocapitalism. Necrocapitalism, the deep pathological dilemma of the neoliberal civilizational body, is depicted in meticulous detail in The Pecari Project and Myanmar North Horror. Both narratives point to the power-money manipulations by some ruling "financial sponsors" in Guatemala and northern Myanmar who stop at nothing to seize profits and disregard the lives of others. Through in-depth exploration of key content and nuanced‌ dissection of core logic, this paper analyzes the connections between neoliberalism, necrocapitalism, and the specific social contexts in the stories from three philosophical dimensions: Butler's spiritual anesthesia of "frameworks implicitly guiding the interpretation", Agamben's "bare life" stripped of all human rights and expectations, and Foucault's "disciplinary power produced by the growth of capitalist economy". It further uses its antithesis, "socialism of life", to examine how the authors in the stories strive to restore the ethics and morality of communal life, and how such efforts support the practice of power and capital serving life and public welfare rather than excessive profits and private desires.

Purpose This paper aims to evaluate the competitiveness of startup ecosystems in emerging countries using a multi-criteria decision-making approach. Design/methodology/approach By integrating the Criteria Importance Through Intercriteria Correlation and Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution methods, this study assesses 14 countries based on 22 factors across six dimensions: Financial Capital, Culture, Supporting Institutions, Markets, Public Policy and Human Resources. Findings Skilled labor emerged as the most differentiating factor within these ecosystems, followed by access to distribution channels and accessibility to technical and vocational courses. In contrast, availability of venture capital, access to venture capital and motivational actions were the least differentiating factors. The findings reveal significant variations in competitiveness, with India leading and Venezuela trailing. Sensitivity analysis and additional scenario-based tests indicates the ranking robustness and reliability. Originality/value This study fills a gap in the literature by focusing on emerging startup ecosystems, which are often overlooked in favor of those in developed countries. The research provides valuable insights into the factors influencing startup ecosystem competitiveness in emerging economies, contributing to a more comprehensive understanding of global entrepreneurial dynamics.

Purpose Coworking spaces attract entrepreneurs and startups by offering lower business costs, knowledge-sharing opportunities, and direct access to financial and human capital. However, to fully leverage these benefits, entrepreneurs must navigate the dual challenge of aligning with audience expectations while maintaining their distinctiveness. This research explores how entrepreneurs navigate this tension within coworking spaces. Design/methodology/approach An inductive research approach was employed, with data collected from three distinct coworking spaces that host entrepreneurs across multiple sectors. Findings Heterogeneous audience configurations shape both the type and intensity of pressures faced by ventures in coworking spaces. In responding to these pressures, ventures engage in co-legitimation – a set of relational and symbolic practices through which legitimacy emerges as a collaborative, rather than purely individual, accomplishment. These practices unfold through everyday interactions, reciprocal support, and strategic presentation, allowing ventures to become embedded in the community while sustaining distinctive positioning over time. Originality/value This study introduces the concept of co-legitimation and contributes to optimal distinctiveness theory by demonstrating how legitimacy in coworking spaces is fluid, audience-contingent, and co-constructed through relational embedding and symbolic positioning.

The paper examines the relationship between technological innovations and the labour markets. The entry of AI into general use has shown significant signs of reducing future job opportunities. Drawing on Schumpeterian growth theory, the study affirms that innovation is a creative process with destructive outcomes. Technological progress occurs in a cycle of vertical innovation that generate temporary monopoly rents for entrepreneurs and inevitably render labour redundant, jobs polarized, and skills obsolete. The creative part of innovation expands aggregate demand, lowers, production, creates new occupations, and shifts labour to words service oriented tasks. In contrast, the destructive phase renders skills obsolete, displaces routine jobs, and accelerate labour market polarization. It also creates short-term hardships due to the relative immobility of human capital compared to financial capital. AI innovation represents a qualitative departure in technological disruption by encroaching on non-routine cognitive tasks previous considered exempt from automation. Preliminary evidence shows AI risks compressing entry-level pathways in knowledge work, slowing skills development, limiting human capital adaptability, and increasing inequality. Emerging economies must remodel human capital development to mitigate the harsh reality posed by technological advancement. Keywords: Creative, Destruction, Innovation, Labour, Displacement.

This commentary situates the ongoing European housing crisis within ongoing processes of housing financialization, challenging approaches adopted in the European Commission’s Affordable Housing Plan that treat housing unaffordability primarily as a problem of supply shortages and investment gaps. In this way, we argue that such an approach neglects the key role of finance and the increasingly active role of state actors in reshaping housing markets in favor of financial capital. Drawing on contributions from this special issue, we focus on two interrelated developments: the diversification of housing into specialized sectors for investments and the supporting role of the state in processes of asset-based accumulation. These processes unfold unevenly across urban contexts, contributing to new modes of dispossession and displacement. Building on this, we argue that the European housing crisis requires answers that involve reprioritizing housing as a social right rather than an asset class.

Climate finance is considered essential to the Global South’s green energy transition, yet little is known about how financial capitalism shapes access to it or the factors determining domestic receptivity. While effectively describing the constraints on Global South development, the financial subordination literature says little about how policy space evolves temporally, green energy climate finance, or the domestic factors that impact climate finance receptivity. To address these gaps, this study combines theory on resource nationalism, the political economy of the green transition and climate finance, with evidence from global liquidity and commodity markets, using process tracing and secondary data analysis to explore the case of resource-nationalist, fossil- and commodity-dependent Bolivia. The paper finds that climate finance flows to Bolivia are contingent on both internal and external factors, including how domestic politics shapes institutions and state receptivity, and how complex interactions between commodity markets and liquidity conditions create variations in policy space. This makes important contributions to a literature that has yet to address issues around climate finance for the green energy transition or changing dynamics in Global South policy space, thereby improving understanding of how Global South states can pursue energy transitions and the role that climate finance might play.

ABSTRACT Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) frequently operate under persistent capital constraints, limiting their ability to compete through scale, price, or sustained financial investment. While creativity is often cited as valuable in such contexts, it remains weakly theorized as an economic input, typically framed as an attitudinal or cultural attribute rather than a strategic investment. This article addresses this gap by introducing and examining creative capital expenditure (CCE), defined as the intentional deployment of emotionally and culturally resonant creativity as a substitute or complement to financial expenditure in capital-constrained SMEs.Drawing on behavioral economics, marketing effectiveness, and entrepreneurship research, the article advances a mechanism-based framework in which creativity influences commercial outcomes indirectly through behavioral mediators, including emotional resonance, cultural fluency, and distinctiveness. Using a mixed-methods research design, the study examines patterns of creative deployment and perceived financial performance among Afro-Caribbean SMEs operating in resource-constrained environments.The findings indicate that higher levels of creative investment are associated with stronger emotional engagement, greater perceived relevance, and increased distinctiveness, which align with improved perceptions of commercial performance. While the analysis does not establish causal magnitude, the observed patterns support the plausibility of CCE as an economically consequential mechanism under constraint.The article contributes to small business and entrepreneurship scholarship by reframing creativity as a form of capital expenditure rather than symbolic expression, offering a behavioral explanation for how creativity conditions financial outcomes in constrained environments. The findings also carry implications for SME practice and policy, suggesting that creative investment plays a strategic economic role alongside, and sometimes in place of, financial capital.

This article sees both the danger and opportunity in our current economic, environmental, and societal crises. A common thread linking our multiple crises, in the United States and across the globe, is widespread and rising precarity. That thread provides an opportunity to fashion a new, precarity-centered economics: a New Political Economy (NPE), a label proposed in the mid-1980s by institutionalists Charles K. Wilber and Kenneth P. Jameson. Because NPE aims to clarify the sources of precarity, it requires the study of economic power. NPE involves shedding light on how individuals and organizations exert their power in ways that generate or intensify precarity, especially the efforts of businesses to shift costs, uncertainty, and risks to workers and society. This article stresses that those efforts take new forms today, but they are not new. In fact, John Kenneth Galbraith argued that business has always aimed to control costs, prices, financial capital, consumer preferences, and even the direction of public policy. The article also emphasizes the interdisciplinary potential of NPE—and the possibility of structuring socioeconomic institutions to generate virtuous cycles, reducing precarity and promoting human progress.

Financial Frictions, Depreciation, and Capital Return Transmission

How does green finance accelerate the shift to energy revolution in developing countries?