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International economic theory suggests that people should embrace economic integration because it promises large gains. But policy reversals such as Brexit indicate a desire for economic dis integration. Here we report results of an experiment of how size and cross-country distribution of gains from integration influence individuals’ inclination to cooperate to reap its intended benefits and to embrace or reject integration. The design considers an indefinitely repeated helping game with multiple equilibria and strategic uncertainty. The data reveal that inequality of potential gains neither affected behavior nor reduced support for economic integration. However, integration may lead to disappointing, unequally distributed welfare gains, undermining support for the policy. This suggests that to better assess integration policies, we should account for the spillover effects of integration on behavior. Miscalculating this behavioral aspect may undermine the intended development goals and motivate calls for dramatic policy-reversals.

This paper aims to assess the effects of road infrastructure planning on socioeconomic opportunities of ruras areas in South Africa. Road infrastructure planning is critical for South Africa's economy because most products, such as petrol, diesel, agricultural products, and mining products, are transported via roads to different localities. In most cases, roads, especially national and provincial, are planned and constructed through populated settlements especially rural areas. The lack of proper road infrastructure in these areas affects the socioeconomic opportunities of the population. Many roads are not constructed to accommodate pedestrians to safely walk and cross the roads; consequently, that leads to pedestrians crossing the roads at areas that are not supposed to, to the detriment. This affects the socio-economic status of the community. The paper employed a qualitative study. The paper used academic articles, legislative framework, and reports to derive the conclusion. The paper argues that the planning of road infrastructure without the consideration of the socio-economic ties of settlements threatens the safety and socio-economic development of the population. The paper found that national and provincial roads are constructed to provide easier transportation of goods and services. The paper concludes that local municipalities should construct safety infrastructure to ensure the safety of people and enhance the socioeconomic ties in these areas.

Contemporary trends in low fertility can in part be explained by increasing incentives to invest in offspring’s embodied capital over offspring quantity in environments where education is a salient source of social mobility. However, studies on this subject have often neglected to empirically examine heterogeneity, missing out on the opportunity to investigate how this relationship is impacted when individuals are excluded from meaningful participation in economic spheres. Using General Social Survey data from the United States, I examine changes in the relationship between number of siblings and college attendance for White and Black respondents throughout the 1900s. Results show that in the early 1900s, White individuals from larger families had a lower chance of completing four years of college education than those from smaller families, whereas the likelihood for Black individuals was more uniform across family sizes. These racial differences mostly converged in the later part of the century. These results may help explain variations in the timing of demographic transitions within different racial groups in the United States and suggest that the benefits of decreasing family size on educational outcomes may be conditional on the specific economic opportunities afforded to a family.

Purpose This study aims to examine the methods of converting the threats caused by sanctions on Iran’s petrochemical industry to economic opportunities and investigating the growth rate of Iran’s petrochemical industry during sanctions. Design/methodology/approach The present research was descriptive-exploratory and the research method was based on a mixed research strategy. In the qualitative part, two methods of content analysis and semistructured interview were used and in the quantitative part, the survey method was used. The participants of the qualitative part were the content of all related published researches that have been published in the past 20 years and to conduct a semistructured interview with experts that were selected by nonprobability sampling method. In the quantitative part, the statistical population, there were including managers, supervisors and experts active in the Iran’s petrochemical industry (especially in Asaluyeh area of Iran), the sampling method was nonprobability of the type available. Findings The findings of the research showed that the potential risks resulting from the sanctions on Iran’s petrochemical industry from the review of the selected researches include 5 main risks (marketing, financial, supply and procurement, technological and production) and 26 related subrisks. Also, the ranking of the mentioned risks showed that among the main risks, the highest rank is related to the financial risk and among the subrisks, the increase in transaction costs and disruption in the implementation of contractual obligations have the highest rank. Research limitations/implications The investigation of the growth rate of Iran’s petrochemical industry during the sanctions in terms of performance (production, export and foreign exchange) showed that the amount of production has gone through a growing trend during the period under review (it has grown by more than 68%). Also, the amount of exports in the investigated time period has been growing (it has grown by more than 70%) and finally, the amount of foreign exchange in this time period has experienced growth (more than 58% growth). Originality/value Introducing and examining methods of turning threats into economic opportunities in Iran’s petrochemical industry under the shadow of sanctions, which can be used in other active industries under sanctions in the energy field.

Political consumption is an individualized form of collective action that varies considerably across Europe. Citizens as consumers participate in boycotts and 'positive' buying of goods based on ethical, political and environmental considerations. Overcoming the individualistic bias of past research, the comparative analysis extends actor-centred explanations by focusing on political, cultural and economic opportunity structures and on globalization as contextual factors. Economic opportunities for political consumption are provided by national affluence, retailing structures and the supply of environmental and fair-labelled goods. Political and cultural opportunities are facilitated by 'statist' institutions, social movement organizations as well as trust and post-materialist culture. The impact of globalization is measured by international economic exchange. Logistic multi-level models on the first wave of the European Social Survey for 19 countries reveal that economic opportunity structures and political institutions best explain variations, while globalization does not affect citizens' decisions to voice their interest in consumption. Finally, the effect of individual value orientations is increased by a low-cost context.

Recent studies take increasingly refined views of how socioeconomic conditions influence political behaviour. We add to this literature by exploring how voters' prospective evaluations of long-term economic and social opportunities relate to electoral contestation versus the stabilization of the political-economic system underpinning the knowledge society. Using survey data from eight West European countries, we show that positive prospects are associated with higher support for mainstream parties (incumbents and opposition) and lower support for radical parties on all levels of material well-being. Our results support the idea that ‘aspirational voters’ with positive evaluations of opportunities (for themselves or their children) represent an important stabilizing force in advanced democratic capitalism. However, we also highlight the importance of radical party support among ‘apprehensive voters’, who are economically secure but perceive a lack of long-term opportunities. To assess the implications of these findings, we discuss the relative importance of these groups across different countries.

This research aims to analyze the regulations and laws that promote economic opportunities for women at an international level, predict their impact on income levels, and estimate when legal gender equality will be achieved across different regions. The countries are compared over time, based on their income levels and regional locations, considering regulatory indicators on mobility, workplace, pay, marriage, parenthood, entrepreneurship, assets, and pensions. The methodological strategy was based on machine learning methods. The results indicate a positive trend in the average scores of all regulatory indicators, revealing significant differences across groups of countries and suggesting more egalitarian regulatory frameworks for developed countries, as well as more imbalanced and less progressive frameworks for underdeveloped and developing countries. The regulatory axes that better predict a country’s income level were parenthood, analyzing laws affecting women’s work after having children; assets, which consider gender differences in ownership and inheritance; and marriage, related to the legal constraints on women affected by marriage and divorce. However, the paternity axis is the last to be achieved.

The U.S. federal government has invested considerable resources in place-based programs to improve local economies, amenities, and infrastructure. Although urban place-based policies have received the most attention, place-based approaches have long been central to efforts addressing rural poverty as well. Using a novel dataset, we document a substantial increase in place-based funding to rural counties from 1990 to 2015. We then assess the association between exposure to place-based funding and socioeconomic outcomes in adulthood using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997. We find that living in counties that received more place-based funding is associated with higher educational attainment and greater earnings, but only for those who migrated in adulthood. We conclude that place-based investment may improve economic opportunity via geographic mobility for rural American youth.

Though the gender gap in workforce participation rate in India is already established, a lack of economic participatory power of females is becoming a major area of concern for overall economic development of the region. India with an upcoming urban economy and rapid transformation into an urban society still lags behind in sending urban women to urban job market and recording only 15.4% of urban females as workers as against the total work participation rate of 35.3% in urban areas. Therefore, issue of analyzing spatial regularity in the distribution of percentage of female population and female workforce participation emerges a significant aspect for finding out the concentration of urban females in relation to their working arena. The present study, therefore, focuses and addresses the issue for spatial regularity in the distribution of females work participation in relation to female concentration in Sehore Municipal Council (Sehore M.C.), an upcoming township of Madhya Pradesh, India, with a high proportion of females, 937 females/1000 males as against state average of 931 females/1000 males, and a female workforce participation rate of 19.15%, which is higher than the state average of 15.1%. Court’s Method of Map Comparison is applied to find out the degree of association of percentage of females in relation to their workforce participation. The study has concluded that there is no spatial regularity in the distribution pattern of female population and female workers as shown by the medial correlation coefficient of − 0.27 with more than 60% of the study area is falling under negative medial correlation. The absence of spatial regularity between female population and female workers is due to lack of economic opportunities for women in Sehore M.C. as well as accessibility and availability to jobs due to social factors and regional economic constraints. Therefore, few suggestions are given for proper planned economic development as well as promotion of secure job avenues for all socio-economic strata of female group of population for Sehore M.C., a forthcoming urban centre of Madhya Pradesh in India.

This article traces the history of the Office of Economic Opportunity/Community Services Administration, focusing on Richard Nixon’s failed attempt to dismantle it in 1973 and Ronald Reagan’s successful effort in 1981. I explore main two main questions: Why was Reagan able to succeed when Nixon had failed? and What does the dismantling of the agency reveal about the development of American conservatism in the 1970s and 1980s? Drawing on original archival materials, I argue that the Reagan administration learned from Nixon’s failures and adopted a more professional, managerial stance when it dismantled the agency in 1981. In addition, recent work in history and political science has explored how the multiracial democratic vision articulated by LBJ’s Great Society helped fuel the modern conservative movement. By focusing on the long-term opposition against OEO/CSA, this article provides new insights into how conservatives articulated an alternative ideology to postwar liberalism.