Hyman Minsky stands as one of the most influential economists of the twentieth century. His contributions to macroeconomic theory are primarily situated within the post-Keynesian tradition. This paper provides a concise overview of the fundamental elements of Minsky’s theoretical framework, focusing on his principal insights, the financial instability hypothesis, and its broader implications. Although Minsky developed his theory predominantly during the 1980s, it remained largely overlooked until the emergence of the global financial crisis in 2008. The present study seeks to evaluate the socioeconomic conditions and prevailing perceptions during the intervening period that contributed to the marginalisation and underappreciation of Minsky’s approach and policy recommendations. In so doing, the paper critically analyses several potential explanations for the relative neglect of his theoretical contributions.

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 paper takes issue with the proposition that low productivity growth in the non-market sector is dragging down Australia’s living standards. To do that, we revisit an old debate that showed that wages should be adjusted for productivity in the market sector alone. That was the argument put by John Nevile and used by the ACTU in the 1975 national wage argument that resulted in quarterly wage indexation. Discounting wages for the lower productivity in the non-market sector causes macroeconomic stress as it prevents wage-earners from purchasing as much of the market sector’s output.

This study explores the relational conditions that influence contractors’ safety management on multi-employer worksites, with a focus on the Swedish mining industry. Using interviews, observations, and informal conversations, the study examines how the blurred boundaries between client companies and contractors shape safety practices. The findings show that safety management is influenced not only by formal contractual relationships but also by the relational dynamics between social actors, where power asymmetries and informal networks play a significant role. The research highlights how these relational conditions – defined by the positions and symbolic authority of the actors involved – impact coordination, communication, and accountability regarding safety. Contractors, often struggling to assert their expertise and legitimacy within the relational field, face challenges in aligning safety practices with client companies’ priorities. The study concludes that to improve safety management on multi-employer worksites, it is essential to address the relational dynamics between contractors and client companies, moving beyond formal agreements to consider the underlying power relations and position-takings that shape safety practices.

The Covid-19 pandemic has negatively affected labour markets, among other aspects of life. This study examines the impact of the discouraged worker effect during the pandemic, focusing on the Turkish labour market from 2018 to 2021. Although few studies exist on this topic, they rely on labour force participation rates, whereas our dataset includes direct questions and data specifically related to the discouraged worker effect, allowing for a microeconomic analysis. Probit regression results show that the discouraged worker effect was stronger during the pandemic, with job seekers being 1.6% more likely to become discouraged than before. Higher education levels generally reduce this likelihood, both before and during the pandemic. While age negatively correlates with discouragement, this effect diminishes with increasing age. Single women were more adversely affected than single men and married women than married men. Higher unemployment rates increase discouragement, as expected, while an increase in the unemployment rate has a greater effect on individuals during the pandemic period. Findings suggest that the pandemic had a disproportionate impact on certain individuals, particularly with respect to education level and gender, while Türkiye’s societal structure may help explain the observed gender-based differences.

The Social Security Pension System of Northern Cyprus faces a significant deficit, with structural imbalances needing urgent policy interventions. The annual deficit is approximately equal to 50% of current pension payments, or 3.2% of GDP. Without a reform, this deficit is expected to continue and may pose a critical obstacle to Cyprus’s EU integration aspirations. The objective of this article is to design a reform to finance this component of the pension system that will address both current and longer-term sustainability. The paper employs a methodology of public sector budgetary accounting and actuarial estimation of the pension deficit under various scenarios. The findings show that the employees’ Provident Fund assets’ vulnerability to the rate of inflation provides an opportunity to combine the contributions of both components of the public-administered pension systems. Such a measure, along with some parametric reforms like increasing the retirement age, would address the current crisis and ensure the future sustainability of the Social Security Pension System.

While unions’ impacts on workers’ overtime have been primarily studied in Western contexts, research on China remains limited. This paper addresses this gap by examining how Chinese unions affect workers’ overtime and compensation, using data from the China Labor-force Dynamics Survey. It also explores heterogeneous protection effects for privileged and unprivileged workers. Probit regression, IV, and PSM methods are adopted to address endogeneity and self-selection biases. Results show that Chinese unions and their perceived efficacy significantly reduce workers’ overtime – particularly illegal (exceeding legal limits) and uncompensated overtime. The protective effect is stronger for unprivileged workers with short-term contracts or easily replaceable tasks. This study provides empirical evidence for the effectiveness and heterogeneity of Chinese unions’ role in regulating overtime, rooted in their ‘party-state face’. It offers new insights into unions’ contribution to safeguarding workers’ welfare and labour rights in China.

Unlike existing studies on labour and income in the digital era, this paper argues not only that the impact of the digital economy’s intervention in the labour process is fragmented rather than comprehensive, but also that the transformation of job demand and labour supply behaviours is simultaneous and related to the attributes of the industries in which they operate. Drawing on the conventional biased technological progress hypothesis and labour process theory, we argue that the digital economy has generally increased the labour income inequality for migrant workers in China. Using geospatially matched China Labour Dynamics Survey 2018 microdata and provincial digitalisation indices, we uncover a digital ‘upgrading trap’: the development of the digital economy hides the process of inequality formation in the hedging relationship between objective labour demand ‘upgrading’ and subjective labour supply ‘expanding’. The former can be summarised as the risk of ‘no job’ and the latter as the risk of ‘no way back’. Counterintuitively, consumer Internet development demonstrates a greater role in both reducing workers’ inequality in secondary labour markets and promoting a fair primary distribution. These findings reconceptualise digital inequality as coevolutionary outcomes, and offer a tripartite governance way for inclusive growth through portable skill certification, algorithmic accountability mechanisms, and interoperable social security systems.

In developing economies, where fiscal space is often constrained, the minimum wage is often seen as a potentially important tool for improving living standards and reducing inequality. Yet, rigorous evidence on its effects at the household level – where well-being is ultimately realised – remains scarce. This article provides the first region-wide analysis of the relationship between minimum wages and household income inequality in Latin America, distinguishing between market (pre-tax and public transfer) and disposable (post-tax and public transfer) income to assess whether the observed pattern is consistent with a predistributive interpretation. Using two-way fixed-effects models on a panel of 15 countries from 2003 to 2020, and triangulating results across SWIID, SEDLAC, and LIS, I find that a higher minimum wage is robustly associated with lower household inequality. The association is strongest when the wage floor is measured relative to average pay, and it appears for both market and disposable income. This parallel compression is consistent with a predistributive interpretation, and the findings are robust to controls for partisanship, alternative specifications, and small-cluster inference. Overall, the results suggest that minimum-wage policy can plausibly form part of a broader inequality-reducing policy mix in contexts of high informality and limited fiscal capacity.

Income inequality is a structural feature in Argentina. This paper advances a relatively underexplored analytical framework that links sectoral disparities in profit rates to differences in union organisation and state intervention. We identify three interrelated dimensions: (a) uneven capital accumulation across sectors, captured by profit rates as an upper bound on wage growth; (b) workers’ collective organisation and bargaining capacity, which shape the extent to which this potential is realised; and (c) the role of the state as a contested arena in which distributive conflicts are mediated. Using panel data econometric models (2006–2019), we examine average wages across private economic sectors, accounting for sectoral profit rates, union strength, and minimum wage policies. Our findings reveal that wage inequality emerges from the interaction between capital’s drive for profit maximisation and workers’ responses through organisation, bargaining, and conflict.

All governments ‘do’ industry policy, in the sense that they engage with business activity within their borders in order to create jobs, to further trade, or simply to keep up with technologies considered necessary for future growth. As a subject of scholarly and policy-related inquiry, however, industry policy was, for much of the period from the 1990s onward, overshadowed by what was widely perceived to be the triumphant march of freer trade and globalisation. Now that, for political, economic, and also environmental reasons, globalisation is viewed more critically, interest in industry policy has returned. But the subject remains controversial, not least because national conditions vary so markedly that mainstream economists remain hesitant to endorse more than minimal interventions. Nowhere have these misgivings been more marked than in Australia, which prides itself on its free trade credentials. But the world is changing unpredictably, and for Australia, as for many other trading nations, a new approach is needed to harness, intelligently, the power of the state in these circumstances.