Data-Driven Methods for Balancing Fairness and Efficiency in Ride-Pooling

Rideshare and ride-pooling platforms use artificial intelligence-based matching algorithms to pair riders and drivers. However, these platforms can induce unfairness either through an unequal income distribution or disparate treatment of riders. We investigate two methods to reduce forms of inequality in ride-pooling platforms: by incorporating fairness constraints into the objective function and redistributing income to drivers who deserve more. To test these out, we use New York City taxi data to evaluate their performance on both the rider and driver side. For the first method, we find that optimizing for driver fairness out-performs state-of-the-art models in terms of the number of riders serviced, showing that optimizing for fairness can assist profitability in certain circumstances. For the second method, we explore income redistribution as a method to combat income inequality by having drivers keep an $r$ fraction of their income, and contribute the rest to a redistribution pool. For certain values of $r$, most drivers earn near their Shapley value, while still incentivizing drivers to maximize income, thereby avoiding the free-rider problem and reducing income variability. While the first method is useful because it improves both rider and driver-side fairness, the second method is useful because it improves fairness without affecting profitability, and both methods can be combined to improve rider and driver-side fairness.

DP 0255 - ‘Robin Hood in Reverse’: persistence and barriers to redistributive fiscal policy

Despite improvements in the living conditions of the population, there has not been a significant change in income disparities. Since the growth of left-wing parties and political competition as per the median voter hypothesis do not stand in the Brazilian case, what could explain the tenacity of inequality in the country? To answer this, the paper, grounded in new institutionalism theory, employed a process-tracing method to explore the causes of the continuity of unequal income distribution in Brazil. The inquiry tests the mechanism using the case of redistributive fiscal policy and the literature of electoral rules and business influence in the political system. This analysis reinforces that the Brazilian government not only misuses its fiscal instruments to distribute income, but also acts as a ‘Robin Hood in reverse’: that is, it withdraws from those who have less to subsidize or pay transfers to those who have more.

COMPARISON OF REGIONAL CLUSTER ANALYSIS ACCORDING TO INCLUSIVE DEVELOPMENT INDICATORS IN JAVA ISLAND 2018 BETWEEN HIERARCHICAL AND PARTITIONING CLUSTERING STRATEGIES

Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is one of the most common indicators to reflect a nation’s development. Indonesia's GDP has an average growth rate of 5 percent over the 2015-2019 period with the highest growth rate occurred in 2018. Furthermore, the provinces in Java Island contributed the most out of any province to Indonesia’s GDP in that year. However, the development in Java Island still has several issues, such as high poverty, unequal income distribution, and high unemployment. This problem indicates that the economic growth in Java Island has not been inclusive concerning development. This study aims to group regencies/municipalities in Java Island based on indicators of inclusive growth. These indicators refer to McKinley (2010) in a journal published by the Asian Development Bank (ADB). The cluster methods used to represent each hierarchical and partitioning are the Agglomerative Nesting (AGNES) and K-Means methods. The results of this study show that there are 3 clusters based on the AGNES method and 4 clusters based on the K-Means method. Clusters with good inclusive growth characteristics are dominated by municipality areas based on the K-Means method. Meanwhile, the clusters with low inclusive growth characteristics are dominated by regencies/municipalities on Madura Island based on the K-Means and AGNES methods. The comparison of the appropriate methods in this study based on the silhouette value is the AGNES method.

Urban Social Waste and Urban Solid Waste in Brazil: Problems, Consequences and Possible Solutions

Brazil is a country of continental dimensions, with a surface area of 8,510,296km2 , which is distributed among 26 federal states and a federal district. However, due to an extremely unequal income distribution, one of the major social problems that the country still faces is urban segregation, experienced by a large part of its almost 212 million inhabitants, who still find severe problems with housing, public transportation, security, health, employment, education and infrastructure, especially with regard tothe process of collecting and the treatment of waste generated. In the case of solid urban waste (SUW), approximately 190,000tons are produced daily, which implies a per capita production rate of 0.90kg(inhab.day)-1. Of the total generated, a fraction greater than 90% (w/w) is collected and, of this fraction, a percentage of 25% is still disposed of in open dumps, generating environmental impacts of different magnitudes. In addition, of the quantity of SUW generated in Brazil, about 55% (w/w) corresponds to putrescible organic matter, which could be fully used as an alternative source of energy (methane gas, for example), which normally does not occur. In these terms, Brazil becomes a country with strong social, economic and public health problems, and with regard to basic sanitation, there are still great demands, especially when considering the collection and treatment of the various types of waste generated.

Grundzüge einer gleichheitsfördernden Arbeitsmarktpolitik in Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz

Inequality is one of the most crucial global problems. Europe is less unequal than the U.S. or the Middle East, yet unequal income distribution has been on the rise again in the DACH countries since 1980. Empirical data show that greater equality is associated with higher economic growth, more wealth and improved welfare. Accordingly, it is politically sustainable to strive for more equality as an explicit goal. Alongside education and taxa­tion policy, labor market policy is one of the most important variables in national equality efforts. From an ­evidence-based perspective, the following four approaches help to reduce inequality on the labor market side: 1) Avoid precarious, insecure and undignified working conditions. 2) Preserve the dual education system. 3) Augment the participation of employees and workers in capital gains and supervisory boards. 4) Pay top managers moderately and in line with the common culture in the DACH countries. Zusammenfassung Ungleichheit gehört zu den drängendsten aktuellen Problemen weltweit. Europa ist weniger ungleich als die USA oder der Nahe Osten, dennoch steigt die ungleiche Einkommensverteilung auch in den DACH-Ländern seit 1980 wieder an. Empirische Daten zeigen, dass mehr Gleichheit mit höherem Wirtschaftswachstum, größerem Wohlstand und vermehrter Lebensqualität einhergeht. Entsprechend ist es politisch nachhaltig, mehr Gleichheit als explizites Ziel anzustreben. Neben der Bildungs- und Steuerpolitik gehört die Arbeitsmarktpolitik zu den wichtigsten Stellgrößen nationaler Gleichheitsbemühungen. Aus evidenzbasierter Perspektive helfen insbesondere die folgenden vier Ansatzpunkte, um arbeitsmarktseitig die Ungleichheit zu verringern: 1) Prekäre, unsichere und unwürdige Arbeitsbedingungen sind unter allen Umständen zu vermeiden. 2) Das duale Bildungssystem ist zu bewahren und zu pflegen. 3) Die Beteiligung von Angestellten und Arbeiterschaft an Kapitalerträgen und Aufsichtsräten ist bewusst zu stärken. 4) Es gilt, die Kader mit Augenmaß zu entlöhnen und sich auf die Kultur des Ausgleichs in den DACH-Ländern zu besinnen.

Economic and Social Sustainability: The Influence of Oligopolies on Inequality and Growth

To realize economic and social sustainability, it is necessary to avoid economic injustice and therefore too unequal a distribution of income and wealth. In this paper we investigate the extent to which oligopolies contribute to an unequal income distribution, and the consequences of enforcing more market competition. For this purpose, an overlapping generation growth model is developed with imperfect competition to derive the influence of market concentration on economic growth and the distribution of income. We investigate the influence of market concentration on the inter- and intra-generational distribution of income and economic growth. We show that political lobbying and corruption are important reasons for missing competition in markets. While an increasing market concentration leads to a more unequal intra-generational distribution and to a redistribution of income from the old to the young generation, the impact on economic growth is in general ambiguous, and specifically depends on the cost of lobbying.

Aspects of protection and social vulnerability of teenagers in public all-day schools

ABSTRACT Objective: identify and analyze aspects related to social vulnerability of a group of teenagers of a public all-day school with regard to harmful and abusive use of psychoactive drugs. Methods: a strategic social study, with a qualitative approach, was carried out with 49 teenagers of a public all-day secondary school. Focus groups were carried out between 2016 and 2017, and the resulting material was transcribed and analyzed by means of thematic content analysis, resulting in the following categories: The family I come from; Birds of a feather; If I’m studying, how can I work?; Drugs: a non-parallel universe. Results: social vulnerability was associated with unequal income distribution, fragile social relations affected by the harmful use of drugs and vulnerability of public all-day schools. Final considerations: all-day schools did not appear as an effective tool to break away with the context of social vulnerability regarding the use of drugs.

Social divisions, party support, and the changes in the Thai party system since 2001

This article investigates the interactions of socioeconomic characteristics and electoral outcomes at the constituency level to demonstrate the change in the Thai party system since 2001. Probing the effects of the agricultural population and income inequality on electoral outcomes in the proportional representation (PR) tier, this article finds that the Thai Rak Thai Party (TRT) and the Democrat Party (DP) attracted voters with opposite social standings. While voters residing in the provinces with substantial agrarian populations tended to vote more for the TRT than the DP, constituencies with highly unequal income distribution were more likely to be DP supporters. The findings provide evidence against alternative explanations, including regionalism and support for a charismatic leader, for the TRT’s consecutive victories. Due to the convergence between social divisions and party support, the Thai party system has become stable and strong enough to resist short-term interventions, implying that the future electoral outcomes will likely be similar.

SOME NON-FINANCIAL ASPECTS OF “ISLAMIC” FINANCES

Currently, capitalist development of countries is closely connected with unequal income distribution both among different segments of the population and among countries. This tendency is clearly seen in the economies of Arab countries, among which there are countries from the top 10 of the richest countries, and countries set back in their economic development by decades because of world power interference in their sovereignty. Thus obtained new economic order shows the formation of new, unequal relations between different countries of Arab world where partnership relations are offset by arisen systemic crisis. The article considers such social and economic processes taking place in Arab countries as migration flows, macroeconomic consequences of decline in the world price of hydrocarbons, cash outflow from Arab oil-exporting countries. In addition, in the article are given main financial indicators of major Arab banks working with Islamic finances, indicators (in dynamics) of the oil sector, consequences of avoidance from commodity dependence by economic diversification in the GCC, the problems of liquidity not peculiar to Islamic financial institutions but to the economies of Middle Eastern countries are analyzed. Based on the information given in the article, it is worth noting that in the context of globalization and external economic processes, Islamic finances represent cash flow of Islamic countries whose essence does not carry their original purpose.

Socioeconomic, regional and demographic factors related to population ageing

Objective: the present study aims to investigate the association between population ageing in municipal regions in the state of Rio Grande do Norte, and socioeconomic, demographic and regional factors. Method: an ecological study that used municipal regions of the state of Rio Grande do Norte as a unit of analysis was carried out. Data collection was conducted through databases from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics, the Institute of Applied Economic Research and the Atlas of Human Development. The factor of Increased Age was created based on factor analysis, which was related to socioeconomic, demographic and regional variables. The chi-squared test with a significance level of 5% was used in addition to the Hosmer and Lemeshow technique for logistic regression. Result: it was found that municipal regions in the Central mesoregion have an older/ageing population, while those with intermediate populations have the oldest individuals. Furthermore, it was found that municipal regions with unequal income distribution and higher levels of education have an older population. Conclusion: it can be concluded that municipal regions classified as older/more aged were associated with the mesoregion to which the municipal region belongs; and those with intermediate population size were associated with favorable educational levels and unequal income distribution.