Robotization and Welfare Trends in Future

There are concerns over the present and possible future impact of new advancements like robots and artificial intelligence on welfare. Experts from different fields including science and business have been concentrating on how new developments may affect the job market, and more broadly how new advancements will influence the society. It would be easy to get support for the use of robots for the tasks which are too difficult or too dangerous for humans. What is the capital owners’ focus at that point? What are the economic and social consequences of robotization? In this chapter, literature review including the recent thoughts on how developments in robotics may cause major changes in welfare distribution and revolutionary economic changes is presented.

ENERGY INSECURITY IN THE ASEAN REGION: THE IMPLICATIONS OF ENERGY POLICY REFORM

Energy insecurity has become an alarming issue among ASEAN countries. One proposal to overcome this energy insecurity is to integrate energy markets among ASEAN countries. In order to do this integration, a major energy policy reform, particularly the elimination of energy subsidy policies, is needed. The main goal of this paper, hence, is to analyze the impact of an energy subsidy reduction policy in ASEAN, particularly in terms of economic growth, environmental improvement and welfare distribution. To achieve this goal, this paper uses a multi-country computable general equilibrium (CGE) for Inter-Regional System Analysis for ASEAN (IRSA-ASEAN) to conduct the analysis. This paper finds that countries in which energy subsidies significantly exist, i.e., Indonesia and Malaysia, stand to gain much from eliminating these subsidies. Gross domestic product (GDP) is likely to increase, with the added benefit of reduced CO2 emissions. In terms of welfare distribution, this policy appears to be progressive in nature.

INFLATION AND INEQUALITY IN A GROWING ECONOMY WITH CASH AND CREDIT GOODS

We develop a dynamic general equilibrium growth model, where households purchase final goods on cash or credit and have different capital and money endowments, to investigate whether inflation affects trends in income and consumption inequality. We show that, under a strong substitutability between cash and credit goods, inflation has a negative relationship with income inequality, but a U-shaped relationship with consumption inequality. The divergence between income and consumption inequality explains several recent empirical observations. This result has important policy implications, as consumption inequality better reflects the welfare distribution whereas income inequality fails to capture consumption disparities resulting from different consumption and asset distributions across households. In the growth model with heterogeneous households, there is a mixed relationship between growth and income inequality, confirming the existence of the Kuznets curve. The inflation-driven asset reallocation might also produce a Mundell–Tobin effect, enhancing growth.

Divergent Paths

The chapter is macro-comparative in nature and examines to what extent the theoretical framework is in line with the historical patterns of authoritarian regime formation. Drawing on historical case accounts, Arabic language secondary liter­ ature, and autobiographical material written by actors involved in the early elite struggles, the chapter spotlights how intra-elite conflict and communal cleavages shaped elites’ incentives for welfare provision. In addition, the chapter maps out the geostrategic environment in which regime formation took place, highlighting differences in the exposure to external threat and the endowment with resources as key constraining factors on welfare distribution. It does so in the form of comparative narratives of coalition formation and the geostrategic context, and demonstrates how the combination of elite competition, communal cleavages, and the geostrategic context widened or narrowed the authoritarian support coalitions.

Konsep Profit and Loss Sharing (PLS) Berbasis Surah Al-Mulk

This study aims to restore human consciousness related to the concept of Profit and Loss Sharing (PLS) on the order of justice and welfare distribution based on Surah Al-Mulk. This research is a qualitative research with a descriptive-qualitative approach. The data collected in this study are secondary data obtained from literature studies of the literature related to problems in the study. The data obtained were then analyzed using descriptive analysis methods. The result of this research is that Al-Mulk surah is able to make people aware of always presenting Allah in all their activities, so that they can avoid the actions that He forbids. Therefore, this researcher uses surah al-Mulk as the basis for the application of the PLS concept.

An economic evaluation on welfare distribution and carbon sequestration under competitive pyrolysis technologies

Pyrolysis and gasification are considered as a means of producing renewable energy and improving energy sustainability, which has become attractive renewable technologies to many countries. Unlike other studies that are conducted in small scale, this study aims to aggregate the economic and environmental effects such as agricultural benefits, energy sale, and carbon sequestration to provide more detailed information to decision-makers before these projects are widely employed. This study first employs a lifecycle assessment to investigate the feasibility, profitability, and emission reduction of four major pyrolysis and gasification technologies using crop residuals, and then conducts a sensitive analysis to examine the most influential factors. The results indicate that the intermediate pyrolysis with rice straw and slow pyrolysis from corn stover could offset the carbon dioxide the most. However, the pyrolysis value is also sensitive to production of the feedstock used. Value adding of stover-based biochar under fast pyrolysis improves profitability but other technologies do not have such patterns. Additionally, while gasification can generate considerable amount of renewable electricity, it yields almost zero percent of biochar that can be used as a soil amendment, and thus its contribution to agricultural sector is trivial.

Prospects for Venezuela in 2020

Subject Prospects for Venezuela in 2020. Significance President Nicolas Maduro has survived a challenging year owing to the ongoing backing of the armed forces, targeted welfare distribution and support from a few sympathetic foreign powers and allies. However, Maduro remains vulnerable in a volatile and unpredictable political context as his opponents are forced to rethink their strategy.

Reviewed Work: Globalization and the Race to the Bottom in Developing Countries: Who Really Gets Hurt? by Nita Rudra (2008)

Nita Rudra’s analysis in her book entitled Globalization and the Race to the Bottom in the Developing Countries challenges the argument of most globalization sceptics who argue that the bottom poor are the particular group who suffer the most from the globalization phenomenon. Rudra’s main argument is that the domestic institutions will be the intermediate between global pressure and domestic social policy. As the aftermath, it is not the bottom poor of the citizens who hurts the most from the impact of the RTBs. It is precisely the middle class that hurts the most, because basically various kinds of policies such as government’s welfare distribution are controlled and determined by certain domestic institutions, whose access is controlled by the middle class and certain political groups, have been more oriented towards the interests of the middle class rather than than the interests of the bottom poor itself.