Social Economies Research Articles

The Right to Urban Happiness and Indexes of Happy Cities

The purpose of the article is to show the importance of urban happiness as a right of social welfare and what are the indicators of international measures that countries must comply with. The research question is: How to achieve happier cities? To answer the question, from the inductive method, a bibliographic search will be made of the concept of urban happiness and of the most relevant health, education and governance indicators proposed since 1979 by the different countries and research centers. Similarly, a contemporary count of the countries with the best indicators of urban happiness and their reasons will be made. Finally, some exemplifying cases of countries with better inter-subjective happiness indexes will be given. The article concludes with the importance of developing countries for achieving more social economies, capable of integrating growth in production (Economic growth) with general welfare and the enjoyment of public values.

Differential impact of constructed land expansion on ecosystem health: A case study in the coastal region of the East China Sea

The expansion of constructed land is one of the important factors leading to the degradation of ecosystems, and it seriously threatens the sustainable development of regional social economies. However, existing studies classify constructed land into one category, and there is a relative lack of research on the impact of different types of constructed land expansion patterns on ecosystem health (EH). In this study, the evaluation of ecosystem resilience was revised based on the spatial neighbourhood effect and human interference. Then the revised vigour-organization-resilience-services (VORS) framework was applied to assess the spatiotemporal patterns of EH in the coastal region of the East China Sea. Constructed land was divided into urban constructed land, rural residential areas, and other constructed lands. And geographically and temporally weighted regression (GTWR) model was used to link the ecosystem health index (EHI) to the expansion of various types of constructed land. The following conclusions were obtained: From 1990 to 2015, the area of constructed land increased by 2.24 times. Urban constructed land displayed a high-density and concentrated expansion pattern. Rural residential areas exhibited a low-density and dispersed expansion pattern. The EH of the study area deteriorated after 1990 and improved after 2000. A healthy ecosystem tends to be healthier, and a poor ecosystem tends to deteriorate. EH showed a high degree of spatial heterogeneity. Shanghai and Jiaxing regions were almost in the very unhealthy range, and this low-value region tended to expand, while the area with an EHI above ordinary accounted for over 90% on the south of Ningbo. The expansion pattern of urban constructed land impacted the regional EH slightly, but the impact was serious in the local EH. However, although the expansion pattern of rural residential areas had a slight impact on the local EH, it had a serious impact on the regional EH. The impact of the expansion of rural residential areas on EH should be given priority consideration in future control policies.

Platformizing Ubuntu? FinTech, Inclusion, and Mutual Help in Africa

ABSTRACT The article explores the ways in which FinTech is constituted as a platform economy in two African countries, Kenya and South Africa. Investigating the intersection of FinTech with the social economies of African mutual help groups, it situates the evolvement of such groups in chronic instabilities shaped by the extractive legacies of colonialism and neoliberal restructuring. Seeking to contribute to wider debates about FinTech-mediated financial inclusion, the article contends that FinTech as a political economy does not simply formalize monetary and financial relations. Instead, it works explicitly at the intersection of formal and informal, by combining old and new, digital and non-digital, inanimate and peopled infrastructures. The paper studies how these sociotechnical assemblages are shaped by colonial legacies, transforming financial relations while carrying forward inequalities. It argues that the peculiar constellation of private capital and financial technology around digital platforms seeks to profit from these social networks that are often seen by FinTech actors as driven by various local versions of Ubuntu, the idea of human interdependence rooted in humanist African philosophy. The article makes novel contributions to several literatures, including those of rotating saving and credit associations, financial inclusion, and formalization.

Measuring the developing trends of international construction industries in global value chains based on value added

ABSTRACT The construction sector is an indispensable element of social economies. The international trade activities for the local construction sectors have been stimulated by the demands of globalization, which accelerates the transfer of value added in the global value chains. This study constructs a measurement framework for the developing trends in the global value chains based on value added and picks up the international construction industries at the sectoral level. Based on the participation index, the position index, and the connection index, the developing trend is measured in order to comprehensively identify the ability of the national construction sectors due to value added in the global value chain. The study results show that the influence on the global value chain derived from technical advantage decreased with the improvement of the construction sectors in emerging economies. The international construction sectors were reallocated based on geographical distribution and competitive advantage after 2008. This paper will prove useful for policymakers by providing a clear method for identifying the precise location in the global value chain of a specific country. Governments can consider sectoral planning at regional and global levels based on a map of advantages and disadvantages.

Spatial and temporal evolution of ecological vulnerability based on vulnerability scoring diagram model in Shennongjia, China

Shennongjia is one of the most important ecological function areas and ecologically vulnerable zones in the world. With the rapid development of social economies, especially tourism, the ecological environment of Shennongjia has experienced profound changes. Exploring the characteristics and changing trends of ecological environment in Shennongjia will help to analyze the causes of the damage to the ecological environment, and build a vulnerability analysis framework with multi-scale, multi-element, multi-flow, and multi-circulation characteristics, which provides an effective research paradigm and analysis tool for the study of regional ecological vulnerability. With the support of RS and GIS technology, this study uses spatial principal component analysis (SPCA) and the vulnerability scoring diagram (VSD) model to comprehensively and quantitatively analyze the spatial and temporal evolution characteristics and driving forces of ecological vulnerability in Shennongjia from 1996 to 2018. The VSD model was selected to decompose the vulnerability into three components of "exposure-sensitivity-adaptation", and 16 indicators were selected to construct an ecological vulnerability evaluation system in Shennongjia, and the evaluation data were organized in a progressive and detailed way. (1) During the study period, the overall ecological vulnerability of Shennongjia is in a mild vulnerability level, exhibiting differentiation characteristics of high in the northeast and low in the southwest. High vulnerability zones are mainly distributed in the main towns and roads. (2) The risk of ecological vulnerability of the entire region presents the characteristics of continuous decline. (3) Land-use types, population density, and vegetation coverage are the main factors driving the evolution of ecological vulnerability. (4) A high level of coupling coordination exists between ecological vulnerability and landscape patterns. Analyses of the ecological vulnerability of Shennongjia shows that the entire region is in a mild vulnerability level. The extreme vulnerability risk of the ecological environment shows polarization. The evolution of ecological environment in Shennongjia is the result of the interaction between human activities and natural environment. This study offers an effective way to assess ecological vulnerability and provides some strategies and guidance for improving ecological security.

The Coronavirus Pandemic and Its Consequences on the Australian Economy in 2020

The fight against the Coronavirus continues around the world. The pandemic affects individuals and families and social groups, states, and economies. Like any other economy in the world, Australia’s economy has to deal with the effects of a pandemic. Australia has chosen its own way of fighting the disease and its consequences. It was not possible to avoid an economic recession, but at the same time, political decisions, aid provided, and social behaviour can be assessed as very effective.

Evaluating and simulating resource and environmental carrying capacity in arid and semiarid regions: A case study of Xinjiang, China

Resources and environment provide the fundamental conditions for human life. With the rapid growth of population and development of regional social economies, the environment and ecosystems have been disturbed to varying degrees. Contradictions among human beings, resources and environment have become a key issue restricting the sustainable development, particularly in arid and semiarid regions. This study takes the arid and semiarid region of Xinjiang, China, as an example. An evaluation model and index system of resource and environmental carrying capacity (RECC) are proposed based on the “pressure-vulnerability-adaptability” (PVA) concept. The RECCs in Xinjiang from 2000 to 2019 were quantitatively evaluated, and the reasons for the spatio-temporal changes of RECC were explored. In addition, the ordered weighted averaging (OWA) algorithm was introduced to realize multi-scenario simulations with concerning different decision-making preferences. Results indicated that: (1) the RECC in Xinjiang presents a spatial pattern of “high pressure around the three mountains and low pressure around the two basins” and the area of high carrying capacity decreased significantly from 2000 to 2019; (2) the pressure risk indicators are key factors in evaluating the RECC and the difference between the regional RECC and pressure risk is largely affected by vulnerability and adaptability; (3) the future regional RECC are predicted differently under different development orientations via the OWA algorithm, which is useful to provide decision-making references for promoting sustainable development.

Opportunity and Inequality Across Generations

We analyze inequality and mobility across generations in a dynastic economy. Nurture, in terms of bequests and the schooling investment into the next generation, is observable but the draw of nature in terms of ability is hidden, stochastic and persistent across generations. We calibrate the model to U.S. data to illustrate mechanisms through which nurture and nature affect mobility and the transmission of income inequality across generations, thus complementing the vast empirical literature. To provide a benchmark for the observed status quo, we solve for the social optimum in which the planner weighs dynasties equally and chooses optimal tax schedules subject to incentive compatibility. Analyzing the transition from the calibrated steady state to this social optimum, we find that insurance against intergenerational ability risk increases on the transition path by making welfare of family dynasties more dependent on nurture relative to nature. The insurance comes at the cost of less social mobility. We compare welfare in the social optimum and economies with a simple history-independent tax and subsidy system.

Technology and Socio-Economic Development in India

The role of technology in business and society has grown at an accelerated pace in both developed and developing markets in the recent past. This has led to the study and use of digital technologies in a variety of fields, ranging from industry, finance and government policies to education, healthcare and social communication. Many authors have examined the link between new technologies and society in the context of what is referred to as the ‘digital divide’ between rich and poor countries. It has been postulated frequently that productivity effects of technology are moderated by country factors, and increased affordability and accessibility of technology has been instrumental in socio-economic growth across social classes, regions and economies. Education and healthcare play a critical role in socio-economic development. With special emphasis on India, this article examines how innovative technology at various levels of complexity influences societal growth, through its contribution to education and healthcare, in emerging economies. The need for and contribution of different players such as the private sector, NGOs and the government in the past few decades in India has also been discussed with emphasis on these two major contributors to development. With support of some examples of innovative entrepreneurial effort, the article discusses the efforts such as extension of use of digital technology to lower socio-economic strata and its impact on education and healthcare.

The Impact of Globalisation on Social Work Practice in Malaysia

Globalisation has significantly changed the pattern of social work including social development, economies, culture and environment in Malaysia. A measurable definition of globalisation has been described in this paper. The impact of globalisation on the Malaysian social work practice has transformed through the various stages of its development experience over the past decade. With this in mind, this paper is a review in which analysed the existing literature and highlighted the impacts of globalisation especially in Malaysia. The other main findings of the paper are that the globalism effect towards social work can be very diverse in different areas of the world including movement of people, culture, education and economy. There is a need to contextualize change in social work versus a broader political and economic context. Malaysia society has also posed many challenges in balancing needs and benefits with greater engagement with globalisation.

A political economy of social impact measurement

Evaluating social impact is more and more becoming established as a major cognitive reference point and as a coordination mechanism.Numerous empirical researches allow us to interpret the emergence of “social impact” as a new substitute for the idea of productivity and performance. Rather than producing a radical critique of these ideas, the paper aims to encapsulate this observation in a longer perspective. Evaluation has always existed, but its modalities have been deeply modified and have become more and more subject to heteronomy, quantification, standardization, and globalization. Public services and more generally the welfare state are no longer immune to this, nor are social economies. The need for measurement of social impact results from concomitant changes which include the mutation of production and the rise of services, and the increase and change (in volume, nature and ends) in evaluation of public policies. Behind the evaluation tools that underpin the discourses and representations of what “effective” means, actors whose function it is to carry out evaluations accord themselves the right to determine objectives previously regarded as public policies, despite avowedly distancing themselves from the political sphere.

Social Modeling via Logic Programming in City of Gangsters

City of Gangsters is a commercial strategy game with significant social modeling mechanics: it is a tycoon management game, where the player needs to work their social connections with a network of roughly 1200 NPCs to get things done, and NPC opinions about the player modulate the player's ability to succeed. We found logic programming to be well suited to our knowledge representation problem, including the need to perform inferences over a relationship network with more than a thousand active characters, and to provide the player with meaningful feedback about the consequences of their actions in the social space. In this paper we present the technical details of this social modeling problem, the details of our logic programming implementation, and how this interacts with the game's design and its social and material economies.

Randomized greedy algorithm for helicopter optimization in the energy industry: a practical approach to model development and solution deliverance

Randomized greedy algorithm for helicopter optimization in the energy industry: a practical approach to model development and solution deliverance

A Novel Model for Detecting Urban Fringe and Its Expanding Patterns: An Application in Harbin City, China

Urban fringe is an active expanding belt, indicating urban-rural interaction processes. Previous studies have attempted to define urban fringe as the transitional area between urban and rural areas, but there is a lack of quantitative analysis of the periphery boundaries. We developed a novel, the Spatial Segmentation Model (SSM), to detect the extent of urban fringe via calculating the share of the built-up land. Within the urban fringe, we statistically compared the number of built-up patches in each direction and described four urban expanding patterns (stable, sprawling, leaping, and mixing patterns) indicated by the empirical analysis. The results show that this model can reliably detect the urban fringe and could reveal urban growth characteristics. We find the spatial territory changes are highly relative with transport infrastructures in Harbin. Meanwhile, the roads density in the urban core are higher than in the urban fringe. Especially for city roads, roads density in the urban core is more than 4 times higher than in the urban fringe. The growth of the urban fringe is closely related to the development of social economies as well as the space policies and development plans designed by governments. Similar to the post-industry cities worldwide, Harbin should take action to address population decline. Effective land-use and suitable urban growth strategies play an important role in alleviating urban shrinkage. Thus, understanding the dynamics, urban expanding patterns, and driving factors in the urban fringe can help us form a basis for future urban development.

Study on strategies for alighting and boarding in subway stations

With its high infection rate, COVID-19 has swept the globe and brought great challenges to social life and economies. As an essential form of public transportation, the Beijing subway plays an important role in transportation systems. In traditional subway organizations, all one-sided doors of a train carriage are employed for passengers’ alighting and boarding. A higher risk of COVID-19 infections may be attributed to inevitable bidirectional conflicts at doors with higher passenger volumes. Moreover, quantitative analyses for this problem and corresponding solutions are, limited in recent studies. In this research, conflicts at carriage doors are analyzed using a cellular automaton (CA) based model. Four schemes to separate alighting and passenger boarding into separate doors are investigated. The performances of different schemes with various alighting and boarding passenger ratios are simulated with the software package Legion Studio. Both macroscopic and microscopic parameters to characterize passenger conflicts are obtained for analysis. The separation of alighting and boarding passenger flows yields the desired reduction in bidirectional conflicts, which further limits the probability of infectious disease exposure. This is an important reference to improve current practices and provide specific measurements of passenger organization under abnormal situations.

Potential Uses of Aloe Vera Extract in Textile Wet Process

Textiles were an important part of both old and social economies. They were vital to many life facets, including clothes and many other applications. Recently, the use of natural materials in textile manufacturing processes was of great importance. Among the natural materials that received great importance was the Aloe Vera plant, as it enters into all stages of textile manufacturing from the first stage to the end because of its very important and beneficial impact on this type of industry. Where it is used as an UV protection, Anti-oxidant, Anti-microbial and also in dyeing and printing process. Add to that Aloe Vera is one of the oldest medicinal plants in human history.

Introducing an anthropology of convenience

This article serves to introduce the Special Issue of Economic Anthropology dedicated to “Convenience as a Driver, Mediator, and Moderator of Social Economies.” The twelve articles in this issue are based on papers presented at the fortieth annual meeting of the Society for Economic Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame from April 30 to May 1, 2020. In this introductory article, I briefly introduce, conceptualize, and generally define “convenience” as a heuristic and part of doxa and as a powerful force driving social economies, freshly revealed in the fractures left by the global COVID‐19 pandemic. I then discuss the etymology of the term convenience and review previous research on the topic of convenience within marketing, technology, business, and the medical sectors, which reveal it to be a fluid, multidimensional concept centered on key concepts such as efficiency, efficacy, ease, comfort, and/or advantage, but also culturally circumscribed. The articles in this issue speak to the complexities of “convenience” with ethnographic cases from the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia. Being one of the cornerstones of consumption driving contemporary global economies, “convenience” as a driver of economies has significant and even positive impacts for issues such as poverty alleviation. It also has, in this hyperscale global economic landscape, negative implications for human societies in its impacts on health and the environment. As such, I argue that convenience is a crucial topic for future anthropological concern.

Where is artificial intelligence? Geographies, ethics, and practices of AI

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly influential in our daily lives, shaping the social structures, economies, and political systems in which we live. From autonomous vehicles to algorithmi...

Inclusive capitalism: economic development or stagnation? A regional perspective

The aim of this paper is to discuss theoretical aspects of the economic changes brought on by transformation processes and the development of social market economies on the one hand and the continued creation of value with socially uneven economic growth and the growing sense of dissatisfaction, irregularities and disproportions on the other. This paper makes references to the search for the optimal model of capitalism, suggests ways of supporting the idea of inclusive capitalism and discusses a number of inequalities, including economic and social. The analyses in this paper are based on Polish and foreign literature, as well as the opinions of economists. The opinions and conclusions presented in this paper are, to a large extent, based on statistical analyses and the results of many years’ of the author’s research into economic transformation. The analysis in this paper is only an introduction to the problems of searching for the optimal model of capitalism that would take into account the inclusive nature of an economic system where a balance between economic and social goals is maintained.

The emergence of covid-19 and its pandemic potentialas a global health security threat and its effect on future life strategy

The novel Wuhan coronavirus, known as SARS-CoV-2, and the disease it causes, COVID-19, are declared as a global pandemic thus breaking havoc on lives and economies around the world.The extent of the outbreak of COVID-2019, which was discovered quite recently, and its massive impact on lives, societies as well as the economies of the affected countries is unprecedented. Cases of COVID -19 infection have so far been reported in 212 countries and territories where more than 71.2 million individuals have been affected till December 2020, resulting in more than 1.6 million deaths. Both, outside and inside China all around the world, COVID-19 is transmitted via human-to-human transmission,which has resulted in such a global outcome. To decrease the cases all the affected countries were under lockdown and eventhoug the cases were incresed dramaticlly. However, all the dailly activiets were moved to a virtual reality which adds more impact to investigate the future of the virtual reallity and its great impact during this hard time. This paper presents a critical study on the outbreak of COVID-19 by providing an analysis on the confirmed cases at Corona's first wave along with discussing the impact of the disease on social lives and economies all around the world.