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This paper aims to understand if buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) services, a digital type of credit that targets young consumers, acts as a protective or a risk factor for food insecurity among young consumers in Australia.

The study uses survey data from a representative sample of young consumers aged 18–24 from all internal states and territories in Australia. Propensity score matching is used to test two hypotheses: BNPL drives young consumers to food insecurity, and food insecurity leads young consumers to use BNPL.

There is evidence that BNPL use is driving young Australian consumers to experience food insecurity, but there is no evidence of food insecurity driving the use of BNPL services.

The evidence of BNPL driving young consumers to experience food insecurity calls for the adoption of practices and stronger regulation to ensure that young users from being overindebted.

Although the link with more traditional forms of credit (such as personal loans) and consumer wellbeing has been explored more broadly, this project is the first attempt to have causal evidence of the link between BNPL and food insecurity in a high-income country, to the best of the authors’ knowledge. This evidence helps to fill the gap about the protective or risky nature of this type of digital financial product, as experienced by young Australians.

The Covid-19 virus badly affected working patterns in almost every sector. The purpose of this paper is to analytically substantiate how work and life integration impacts the exhaustion and work–life balance among employees of academic institutions and IT companies.

Current study is empirical in nature based on the survey of 500 respondents taken from academic (250) and IT companies (250) from Ahmedabad and Gandhinagar, Gujarat. Structural equation modelling (SEM) was used to test the hypothesis with the application of the software Smart-PLS. Two surveys were conducted to collect the data separately for academic institutions and IT organizations.

Findings revealed the facts that during Covid-19, the employee’s work and life integration affected the work–life balance and exhaustion in academic institutions highly. The relationship was positively significant. But, for IT employees, it was identified as non-significant.

The current study highlighted the issues which employees faced during Covid-19 severe spread while managing work and family; how it varied due to the nature of work performed by the employees, for example, academics being more exposed to transformation from offline to complete online mode posed more challenges to teaching staff. This study also disclosed the scenario created and how it was handled in the deadly phase.

This study presents the social contribution in understanding the importance of work and life balance and problems related to it, especially when everyone everywhere is scared of going out. The study provides insight into how it became difficult for employees to maintain their payroll successfully.

The current study contributes to the existing body of knowledge by testing statistically that the integration between work and life is important for work–life balance and prohibiting emotional exhaustion. The current paper extends the theoretical contribution by offering suggestions to companies on why to synchronize positive balance between work and life while keeping boundaries relatively strict between family and work to gain employee well-being and competitive advantages.

The COVID-19 pandemic was a shock to the food supply chain without modern precedent. Challenges in production, manufacturing, distribution and retailing led to the highest rates of food price inflation in the US since the 1970s. The major goal of this paper is to describe statistically the impact of the pandemic of food price inflation and volatility in the US and to discuss implications for industry and for policymakers.

We use Bureau of Labor Statistics data to investigate food prices in the US, 2020–2021. We apply 16 statistical approaches to measure price changes and volatility and three regression approaches to measure counterfactuals of food prices, had the pandemic not occurred.

Food price inflation and volatility increased substantially during the early months of the pandemic, with a great deal of heterogeneity across food products and geographic regions. Food price inflation was most pronounced for meats, and contrary to expectations, highest in the western US Forecasting approaches demonstrate that grocery prices were about 7% higher than they would have been without the pandemic as of the end of 2021.

The research on COVID-19 and the food system remains in its nascent stage. As findings on food loss and waste, employment and wages, food insecurity and more proliferate, it is vital to understand how food prices were connected to these phenomena and affected. We also motivate several ideas for future work.

The agricultural sector in any country plays an important contributor to national output along with its high absorbability of the working population. In the agricultural sector, paddy production holds a major share in the total output in countries like India. The growth and stability of the paddy production at the national level depends on the same factors at the sub-national levels such as the provincial and district levels. The present study focuses first on the stability analysis of the quantity of food production and irrigation facilities in the top 10 rice-producing states in India and then on the stability of yield rates in three varieties of paddy production, Aus, Aman, and Boro, and irrigation facilities across the blocks in the Paschim Medinipur district of West Bengal, as a special reference. The analyses involves the evaluation of the growth and stability using Coppock’s method and trend analysis. It is found that Uttar Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh have a positive significant correlation between irrigation facilities and paddy production. From this study, it is also found that the correlation between changes in the yield rate of Aus, Aman, and Boro production and changes in irrigation is positive and significantly related to each other for Garbeta 1, Garbeta 3, Keshiary, Kharagpur 2, Chandrakona 1, and Chandrakona 2 blocks in Paschim Medinipur district under West Bengal. Therefore, the results recommend that the government should focus on irrigation facilities in those areas where the benefits of irrigation facilities are fully realized.

Uncertainty in commodity pricing is a major cause of concern for farmers of developing countries like India. To observe the decision-making process of farmers of Burdwan district of West Bengal, India, the generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity (GARCH) model is employed to measure the extent of volatility in spot prices of potato and also to observe the existence of seasonal effects; Agmarknet database provided by Government of India over the period of 2003–2019 has been used. The market price of potato decreased during its season of production and peaked during the off-season period. The result implies that the volatility of potato forecasting is tending towards the standard error correction in the long run and from 2003 to 2019; the trend of potato price was influenced by multiple events. The result indicates that the farmers must focus on short-run structural events in the potato market.

This study examines the impact of online budget planning platforms (e.g. Goodbudget, Mint) on households’ financial satisfaction. Furthermore, the authors identify the channels and the cross-sectional heterogeneity of this impact based on households’ income, financial literacy and minority groups.

This study utilizes data from the National Financial Capability Study (NFCS) for 2018 and 2021, which encompasses over 50,000 households. The authors apply logit and ordered logit regression techniques to examine the research questions and use propensity score matching and entropy balancing to address potential sample selection bias.

The authors find a substantial correlation between the adoption of financial budgeting tools and a notable improvement in households’ financial satisfaction, driven by the promotion of healthy financial behaviors and enhanced financial self-efficacy. The empirical findings underscore that the positive effects of online budget planners are more pronounced among low-income, financially illiterate and Black households.

This study is the first to examine the impact of online budget planners on household financial satisfaction. It contributes to the literature by offering valuable insights into how these tools influence financial satisfaction within households.

The study is undertaken to examine the technical efficiency (TE) of small pond fishery using the stochastic frontier model in the northern region of the state of West Bengal in India. The 65 samples were collected through field surveys in Uttar Dinajpur and Dakshin Dinajpur districts for three months (i.e. from May to June) in the year 2022. The stochastic frontier model estimation indicates that boosting investment in labour, organic fertilizers, fish fingerlings and land area has the potential to enhance returns in fish production. The findings demonstrate that TE spans between 83 and 100 per cent, averaging at 94 per cent. This suggests that, on average, fish farmers in the examined region are operating slightly below the highest achievable production level, falling short by approximately 6 per cent, which raises concerns about sustainability. The study recommends that the use of labour and organic fertilizers (i.e. cow dung) should be made available to transform traditional rearing practices into more productive scientific methods. Also, the land area should be extended and more fish fingerling should be used to increase the production of fish in the study area.

This study aims to analyse the impact of outdoor climate, building configuration and locations of public amenities on pedestrians’ walking behaviour and their outdoor thermal comfort. As outdoor climate can rapidly change within minutes, this study maintains that outdoor thermal comfort should be analysed at the pedestrian scale and within a short period to understand people’s walking behaviour and how it may affect urban activities.

This research analyses the thermal stresses experienced by pedestrians and their walking patterns within a sub-hour timeframe in Darling Square, Sydney. The simulation incorporates multiple outdoor climate analyses with agent-based modelling (ABM) simulation; it runs on a parametric modelling platform to predict walking patterns according to the agents’ innate properties, goals and environmental constraints as the weather fluctuates.

This study demonstrates that mapping outdoor thermal comfort within a shorter timescale could reveal emergent walking patterns that inform pedestrians’ preferences of their surrounding environment and their walking behaviour.

The findings could inform planners and stakeholders on how outdoor climate and building configuration affect pedestrian walking patterns for improving outdoor space quality during the design process or post-occupancy evaluation.

This study integrates ABM that incorporates multiple agents’ goals and innate properties and a micro-climate analysis on diverse context geometries under sub-hour periods, compatible with the pedestrian walking speed and distances at the neighbourhood scale.

This chapter specifically examines the convergence (divergence) effect of agricultural production by sector and the effect of agricultural production on environmental sustainability using West African countries as a case study. Annual time series variables covering the periods from 2000 to 2022 were empirically analysed using system dynamic panel-data estimation. Results showed significant beta-divergence in crop production, livestock production and total agricultural production, with a half-life of divergence rates of 10.71%, 13.15% and 16.91%, respectively, for crops, livestock and aggregate agricultural production. It was also found that the consumer prices index had a positive and significant effect on crop production, livestock production and total agricultural production. The findings also showed that crops and livestock production had a negative and significant effect on arable land and a positive and insignificant effect on CO₂ emissions. Also, total agricultural production had a negative and insignificant effect on arable land and a positive and insignificant effect on CO₂ emissions. It was also found that gross fixed capital formation had a negative and significant effect on arable land and a negative and insignificant effect on CO₂ emissions. The government and pertinent parties ought to promote sustainable farming practices such as conservation agriculture, rotational grazing, agroecology and reduced dependency on chemical inputs. Policies that support legislation that provide financial incentives for environmentally sustainable agricultural activities and encourage of preservation of biodiversity are suggested.