Inclusive housing programmes to stimulate the economy and improve health outcomes after COVID-19

Countries around the globe have experienced the health and economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. In many countries in the Global South, interventions in the housing sector can support public and private investments and have large economic stimulus effects. This article develops a series of principles that would ensure investments in housing not only serve as economic stimuli but deliver the basis for long-term improvement in housing conditions and overall community wellbeing and health by being inclusive and sustainable. This article proposes five principles and illustrates how to apply them in core areas that would typically be included in a housing stimulus package: 1) focus on supporting housing for the underserved middle- and lower-income households; 2) inclusion of both ownership and rental markets; 3) inclusion of both formal and informal housing markets; 4) incorporating communities; and 5) avoiding long-term negative effects on housing and housing finance market development.

Explaining face-voice matching decisions: The contribution of mouth movements, stimulus effects and response biases

Previous studies have shown that face-voice matching accuracy is more consistently above chance for dynamic (i.e. speaking) faces than for static faces. This suggests that dynamic information can play an important role in informing matching decisions. We initially asked whether this advantage for dynamic stimuli is due to shared information across modalities that is encoded in articulatory mouth movements. Participants completed a sequential face-voice matching task with (1) static images of faces, (2) dynamic videos of faces, (3) dynamic videos where only the mouth was visible, and (4) dynamic videos where the mouth was occluded, in a well-controlled stimulus set. Surprisingly, after accounting for random variation in the data due to design choices, accuracy for all four conditions was at chance. Crucially, however, exploratory analyses revealed that participants were not responding randomly, with different patterns of response biases being apparent for different conditions. Our findings suggest that face-voice identity matching may not be possible with above-chance accuracy but that analyses of response biases can shed light upon how people attempt face-voice matching. We discuss these findings with reference to the differential functional roles for faces and voices recently proposed for multimodal person perception.

Government Stimulus Policy Effects to Foster Indonesia's Economic Growth: Evidence from Seventeen Years' Experience

We study the budget stimulus effects and government spending to help foster the recovery of Indonesia's current economic growth that was hit by the monetary crisis 1997 and 2008. Using government spending allocation policies through capital expenditures, infrastructure expenditures, financing through government debt, private debts, and increased productivity through export and import activities. This research provides to proves the extent to which macroeconomic variables could promote Indonesia's economic growth due to the crisis—using quantitative analysis of time series in the analysis of cointegration autoregressive distribution lag and bounds testing cointegration starting from 2001 Q4 to 2018q4 data. We can prove that in the short term, the most influential factor in economic growth is the first lag of the GDP growth itself; The first lag of exports, and the first lag of government spending and imports. However, some factors still negatively affect corruption control, government effectiveness, and government debt. While in the long term, government expenditure and imports still have a positive effect, but corruption control is still hurt GDP.JEL Classification: G18, O47How to Cite:Sriyanto, A., Murwani, S., & Sofilda, E. (2021). Government Stimulus Policy Effects to Foster Indonesia's Economic Growth: Evidence from Seventeen Years' Experience. Signifikan: Jurnal Ilmu Ekonomi, 10(1), 63-76. https://doi.org/10.15408/sjie.v10i1.15480.