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Abstract Although different profiles of vaccine-hesitant individuals have been hypothesized, most studies focus on isolated psychological factors, overlooking their interaction. Using data from an online survey of a representative sample of 807 Italian adults, we explored vaccination attitudes through a person-centered approach. An exploratory factor analysis of selected variables related to personal values, attitudes, and beliefs identified four psychological drivers: Eco-humanism (altruistic/biospheric values, connectedness to nature), Skeptical Perspective (distrust in science, conspiracy mentality, spirituality), Goal-Driven Positive Mindset (hope and optimism), and Self-Centered Attitude (hedonic/egoistic values). We assessed the effect of adherence to these drivers on negative vaccination attitudes (as measured by the VAX-I scale) via linear and quantile regression models. Overall, adherence to Eco-humanism was inversely related to negative attitudes (effect estimate: -0.375; 95% CI: -0.567 - -0.182 for the 5th vs. the 1st quintile, p for trend <0.01). A direct association emerged for Skeptical Perspective (effect estimate: 1.622; 95% CI: 1.427 - 1.817) and Self-Centered Attitude (effect estimate: 0.572; 95% CI: 0.385 - 0.759) in the 5th quintile. No association was found for Goal-Driven Positive Mindset. Eco-humanism correlated with lower mistrust of vaccine benefits and reduced concerns about pharmaceutical profiteering (p < 0.01). Goal-Driven Positive Mindset was directly associated with reduced mistrust of vaccine benefits (p < 0.01). Self-Centered Attitude was linked to greater concerns about pharmaceutical profiteering, fears of unforeseen future effects, and preference for natural immunity (p < 0.01). Skeptical Perspective was directly associated with all the aforementioned negative attitudes (p < 0.01). These findings suggest that distinct psychological drivers shape vaccination attitudes, pointing to the potential of tailored vaccination-promotion strategies.

Amid economic crises and the collapse of land-based fiscal revenue, China’s county governments face severe fiscal insolvency. The emergence of the “operational-first finance” approach comprises informal coping strategies developed by financially distressed county governments to circumvent the constraints of formal institutions. Some of these strategies have evolved into adaptive informal institutions. To open this black box, our in-depth investigation identifies three principal approaches. First, vertical bargaining – manifested in the manipulation of transfer payments, project packaging, and debt transfers – leverages shared interests and has become the dominant strategy for fiscal survival. Second, market profiteering – reflected in the promotion of new land-based fiscal revenue mechanisms and the sale of public resources – operates in quasi-legal grey zones but proves insufficient to remedy funding shortfalls. Third, societal extraction – implemented through heightened taxes and non-tax revenues and often perceived as “civilian plundering” – involves practices characterised by overt illegality or excessive social costs that prevent them from becoming widespread, given considerations of organisational and individual rationality.

COVID-19 vaccination acceptance is important, and combating hesitancy which is generally based on the individuals' beliefs and perceptions is essential in the present pandemic. This study assesses COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy and associated factors, beliefs and barriers associated with COVID-19 vaccination. A cross-sectional study was carried out among 492 Bangladeshi residents (76% male; mean age = 24.21 ± 4.91 years; age range = 18-50 years) prior to the nationwide mass COVID-19 vaccination campaign (September 28, 2021). A semi-structured e-questionnaire included three sections (demographic variables, beliefs around the vaccination, and perceived barriers regarding COVID-19 vaccination). More than a quarter of participants (26.42%) were hesitant, 70.33% reported to accept the vaccine, and 3.25% refused to be vaccinated. While (54%) believed that mass vaccination would be the most effective method to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, concerns regarding the side effects of the vaccine (58%), inadequate vaccine trials before human administration (43%), commercial profiteering (42%), and mistrust of the benefits of the vaccine (20%) were also reported. In addition, other barriers including a short supply of vaccines, unknown future adverse effects (55%), low confidence in the health system (51%), doubts regarding its effectiveness (50%) and safety (45%), and insufficient information regarding potential adverse effects (44.7%) were reported. In bivariate analysis, variables such as current political affiliation, previous vaccination history, and health status were significantly associated with the COVID-19 vaccine uptake variable (acceptance, hesitancy, refusal). Regression analysis showed that participants who identified with the opposing current political parties, and not having been vaccinated since the age of 18 years were significantly more likely to report vaccine hesitancy. The current findings relating to COVID-19 vaccination demonstrate that government and policy makers need to take all necessary measures to ensure the effectiveness of the vaccination program among the Bangladeshi people.

The article deals with food profiteering in the Bohemian Lands after the declaration of Czechoslovakia in 1918. The new state faced a disintegrated society in which various units continued to fight each other for an advantage in the food market. While food shortages persisted, the Czechoslovak authorities had to deal with a situation in which food rationing laws had lost some of their power to distinguish between the legal and the criminal. Moreover, collective ideas about what was right and wrong, about the victims and perpetrators of food profiteering, and of whom to punish and how, varied according to the different social and ethnic affiliations of the population. Political instrumentalization of such ideas jeopardized the postwar consolidation based on the promise of a better future. Thus, the introduction of food profiteering courts with lay judges was an attempt to institutionalize conflicts over food profiteering and to reduce the impacts of the atomization of society until the economic situation improved.

Private equity ownership across the US health care system is rapidly increasing, yet ownership structures are complex and opaque. We used an economic data set tracking mergers and acquisitions linked to Medicare data to identify private equity hospice acquisitions. Given the influence of for-profit ownership on hospice quality, transparent data on private equity investment are fundamental to ensuring high-quality end-of-life care.

Previous research has consistently found that more political conservatism is related to higher anti-vaccination attitudes. However, little work has investigated how intellectual humility could potentially contribute to this relationship. Employing the social judgment theory of attitude change, we examined whether conservatism could mediate the association between intellectual humility and anti-vaccination attitudes. Participants (N = 1,293; 40.1% female; Mage = 38.23 years, SDage = 11.61, range of age was 18–78) completed a multifaceted measure of intellectual humility, an assessment of four types of anti-vaccination attitudes, and a measure of political orientation. Results from structural equation modeling revealed that decreased levels of most aspects of intellectual humility (i.e., independence of intellect and ego, openness to revising one’s viewpoint, and lack of intellectual overconfidence) are associated with more conservative political views, which in turn is associated with stronger anti-vaccination attitudes, particularly worries about unforeseen future effects, concerns about commercial profiteering, and preference for natural immunity. These findings suggest that intellectual humility could reflect one’s latitude widths, thereby predicting their openness to vaccine massaging, and thus may play an important role in addressing anti-vaccination attitudes, especially when politics is involved.

Intersectional impacts of climatic changes are producing unforeseen physical and mental health challenges such as acute depression, stress, severe malnutrition, cervical cancer, sexually transmitted diseases for the poor and marginalized women and children. Conducted in the Indian Sundarbans, a social-ecological system critically stressed by climate change, this study disentangles, uncovers, and highlights obscured ways in which sudden and slow-onset eco-climatic shifts induced by climatic changes interact with existing patterns of social-ecological (mis)governance, gender inequity, power structures and struggles, therein, patriarchal policies and neoliberal markets. Coping mechanisms of the communities are shaped by complex, multi-layered, and scalar processes that involve institutional failures, private markets, and neoliberal governance patterns, which in turn are resulting in severely negative health consequences for women and children. Employing a justice lens and an agent-based coproduction of knowledge helps to move beyond the obscured causalities for specific health threats to foster an agenda for action. At the local scale, this framework identifies diverse and novel ways in which development policies and governance across domains must synergize to enhance specific capacities of women and children, allowing them to make right adaptation choices that bolster their long-term resilience. Theoretically, it uncovers how the global resilience agenda is increasingly being dominated by disaster capitalism that is producing negative health consequences at the local levels. Private capital, in conjunction with or through alliances with the state, identify weaknesses of resilience governance as profiteering opportunities and promote “adaptation” products and services through a hegemonic process. Despite producing maladaptation in the Sundarbans, the hegemony ensures that the pattern is reinstated and reproduced consensually. This pushed the responsibility of maladaptation into individual domains. Repoliticizing and affirmatively sabotaging this resilience design seems essential, which future studies should aim for.

In this article we develop and analyse novel datasets to retrace the persistence and scale of underground market activity in Maoist China. We show that, contrary to received wisdom, Chinese citizens continued to engage in market-based transactions long after “socialist transformation” was ostensibly complete, and that this activity constituted a substantial proportion of local economic output throughout the Maoist era. This helps to explain, in part, why, when markets were officially reopened in China, private economic activity took off. We arrive at these findings through the development and analysis of novel datasets based on unconventional historical sources – namely, a collection of 2,690 cases of “speculation and profiteering” that were recovered from flea markets in eastern China. We show how these grassroots sources can be systematically analysed and used, in lieu of official statistical aggregates, to develop new insights into the macro workings of the Maoist economy.

The paper sheds light on the problem of the growing embracement of penal populism (fines and prison sentences) as a measure for dealing with road trauma in Africa through a case study of Ghana. It argues that the policy of hunting for rogue drivers to make roads safer in the continent is as ineffective as killing mosquitoes one by one to control malaria. The best remedy is to drain the swamps in which they breed. The swamps, in respect of road trauma in Africa, are the ineffective public transportation systems and the focus on constructing more expensive roads, which encourage the importation of more old cars, and a high dependence on privately run, deregulated commercial passenger transport sectors that are structurally embedded in driver exploitation. These factors coupled with police corruption and the traffic congestions induced by private capital-driven land-use patterns are what underlie safety-adverse driving and road transport problems generally in the continent. More fundamentally, the paper argues that the law enforcement-heavy approach to road trauma essentializes African drivers as having a danger-prone driving culture. This generates (in)discipline concerns that act as a red herring by deflecting attention from the structural factors undermining road safety in the continent: the continuing effects of neoliberal programs funded by international development bodies, and the profiteering and political interests of powerful coalitions of private transport owners’ unions and public officials that have molded and entrenched the continent’s road transport sectors in its present problematic forms to serve particular purposes. The paper hopes to move road safety conversations in Africa away from the present thinking that enforcing greater punishments against drivers, rather than addressing the broader societal systems whose effects manifest in the road transport sector, is “ the ” answer to the unacceptably high rate of carnages on the continent’s roads.

Human trafficking, commercial sexual exploitation and modern slavery have experienced an unprecedented boom over the past decade due to the development of information and communication technologies (ICTs), particularly in digital and networked environments. These developments have created new opportunities for human exploitation and illegal profiteering. Adult Services Websites (ASWs), online platforms on which sex workers post profiles advertising their services, are a key conduit for human traffickers to exploit their victims. Alongside profiles of independent sex workers, traffickers are posting false ASW profiles, advertising the forced services of their victims and camouflaging these false profiles amongst legitimate adverts. In response, police practitioners are proactively investigating ASWs to identify suspect profiles. A key obstacle for practitioners, however, is to distinguish between ASW profiles posted by independent, consenting sex workers advertising their services, and those posted by traffickers exploiting their victims. The exploratory study presented in this paper seeks to address this particular challenge. Working with a British police force, the researchers in this study gathered existing knowledge on the traffickers’ use of ASW profiles to create a bespoke tool of analysis, the Sexual Trafficking Identification Matrix (STIM). The aim of this tool has been to identify ‘risk indicators’ on ASW profiles and to flag these for potential police investigation. This paper presents the results of this exploratory study and its four stages. Furthermore, more broadly, it reflects on the use of evidence-based tools by law enforcement to tackle complex domains of offending such as those of human trafficking and commercial sexual exploitation.