Global mortality rates continue to decline, and life expectancy continues its upward trend. Besides mortality levels, policymakers and providers of financial and health services would also be interested in disability prevalence and its potential future trajectories. The length of time in good health versus the duration with major disabilities or long-term illnesses has significant financial implications for both individuals and society. In this paper, we develop Bayesian common factor models to analyse Australian age- and sex-specific disability prevalence rates. In particular, there are one or more common factors shared by both sexes, as well as specific factors for each sex. Retirement villages are purpose-built residential complexes designed for relatively healthy retirees to live as neighbours and share a communal lifestyle. We apply the model forecasts and simulations to valuate a typical retirement village contract. The cost of this accommodation service is determined by the resident’s total length of stay, which can be estimated using forecasted and simulated disability prevalence rates and mortality rates from our proposed models.

Political engagement in highland Peru has changed over the past half century along with the economic, policy, and institutional environment, as demonstrated through this case study. Allpachico, a legally recognized peasant community (comunidad campesina), participated in a national peasant association that actively defended shared livelihood interests based on small-scale farming in the 1970s. Political and economic crises in the 1980s and 1990s undermined both protests and organizations. In the current neoliberal era, the state has promoted large-scale mineral extraction and municipal government while sidelining peasant farming and the comunidad. With few local jobs and scant returns to agriculture, Allpachiqueños have migrated to Lima, but many maintain their houses in the community. Despite the increasing diversity among Allpachiqueños, they continue to unite for projects for the common good, now manifesting in lobbying the local municipal government for improvements to urban structure. A communal habitus persists even though the scope of what is possible to demand has shifted from livelihood to lifestyle concerns.

Understanding the barriers to women’s employment and implementing inclusive initiatives in STEM workplaces is a critical global challenge. This systematic literature review applied a PRISMA-guided protocol to screen and critically appraise 44 empirical publications across four multidisciplinary databases. This review produced a structured analysis of the nature of barriers, their outcomes, and inclusive organisational initiatives for women in STEM workplaces. The study identifies intersecting barriers – bias-related, stereotype threat, culture, and structural – that hinder women’s representation and career progression. Inclusive initiatives, such as mentorship, stereotype reduction, equitable policies, and transparent promotion pathways, are explored as solutions; however, there are gaps in measuring their long-term efficacy and incorporating cross-cultural and intersectional perspectives. The findings underscore the need for robust theoretical frameworks and empirical research to promote equity and inclusion, thereby unlocking the full potential of women in STEM.

This article proposes the examination of the climate politics of labour unions, particularly the strategy of just transition, through the prism of environmental labour studies, an ecosocial approach to labour environmentalism. In the first part, it presents a historical overview in order to highlight how the just energy transition became a central element of labour environmentalism. The paper then examines the double impact of climate politics and just transition on labour environmentalism – narrowing its substantive focus while deepening the intersection of nature and labour within and beyond the workplace. The second part draws on the environmental labour studies approach to propose that labour environmentalism should take into account the inseparable relationship between labour and nature, expand the scope of work and workers, and account for global divisions of labour. In our view, such a programmatic shift will ensure that work and workers are placed centrally within ecosocial politics.

Federated Learning is a novel method of training machine learning models, pioneered by Google, aimed for use on smartphones. In contrast to traditional machine learning, where data is centralised and brought to the model, Federated Learning involves the algorithm being brought to the data, ensuring privacy is preserved. This paper will demonstrate how insurance companies in a market could use this technique to build a claims frequency neural network prediction model collectively by combining and using all of their customer data, without actually sharing or compromising any sensitive information with each other. A simulated car insurance market with 10 players was created using the freMTPL2freq dataset. It was found that if all insurers were permitted to share their confidential data with each other, they could collectively build a model that achieved 5.57% of exposure weighted Poisson Deviance Explained (% PDE) on an unseen sample. However, if they are not permitted to share their customer data, none of them can achieve more than 3.82% exposure weighted PDE on the same unseen sample. With Federated Learning, they can retain all of their customer data privately and construct a model that achieves a similar level of accuracy to that achieved by centralising all the data for model training, reaching 5.34% exposure weighted PDE on the same unseen sample.

China’s recent expansion of Home- and Community-Based Services (HCBS) may influence fertility intentions among women of childbearing age. Using data from the China Labor-force Dynamics Survey (CLDS, 2014–2018) and a multi-period difference-in-differences (DID) design, we examine the effect of HCBS reforms on women’s fertility expectations and explore the channels through which these reforms operate. Our results show that HCBS expansion significantly reduces fertility intentions, with an average decline of approximately 0.12 children per woman. The effect is stronger among women with siblings, those who already have children, rural residents, and women in their prime childbearing years (aged 25–34 years). Mechanism analysis indicates that this reduction is mediated by increased perceived community safety, greater participation in pension insurance, and higher economic satisfaction. These findings suggest that elderly care policies can shape reproductive decisions, highlighting the need for integrated strategies that address both ageing and fertility concerns in China.