Strengthening health systems for displaced populations: AA systematic review of access to surgical care in low- and middle-income countries

There are over 122 million forcibly displaced people in the world, many of whom face complex healthcare needs. A global estimate from 2016 suggested that around three million surgical procedures are needed annually to meet the needs of refugees, internally displaced people and asylum seekers. This systematic review aims to synthesise literature on access to surgical care for displaced populations living within camp settings in low- and middle-income countries. Relevant articles were identified by searching three databases between January 2003 and June 2024, with no language restrictions, and findings were synthesised narratively. In total, 21 studies met our inclusion criteria. Findings were synthesised thematically under macro-, meso-, and micro-level factors influencing access to surgical care. Macro-level factors included political support and availability of funding, cost-effectiveness of surgical provision and interactions between displaced and host-country populations. At the meso-level, provision of surgical care within camps was constrained by limited resources. In some settings, these challenges were mitigated through task-shifting and sharing, adoption of tele-medicine and collaboration with local and international partners. Referrals to outside facilities were indispensable to treat surgical patients who could not be managed within camp settings. Micro-level factors included socio-demographic and cultural characteristics of refugees as well as patients’ ability to pay for healthcare services. Our review provides comprehensive insights into the barriers and facilitators that influence access to surgical care within these settings, which is crucial to address the pressing healthcare issues faced by displaced populations

Creating and sustaining space for play as leeway for innovation

Large established organizations face the 'paradox of institutionalizing spontaneity'. While they recognize the need for innovation and create enabling structures to support it, these very structures can inadvertently constrain the spontaneous qualities essential for breakthrough innovation. This longitudinal ethnographic study explores how organizational members navigate this paradox by following six innovation projects over three years at a multinational technology company. Our processual analysis that combined participant observation, interviews, diaries, and project-related documents reveals that innovation projects progress through tactically re-created 'spaces for play'—temporary leeway that innovators create for themselves within existing organizational structures. We show how these spaces develop through recurring patterns of opening, maintaining, and reconstituting and how project teams employ situated tactics to creatively leverage specific organizational structures to open and sustain them. Projects advance by realigning with company strategy to re-open space for play, while those failing to connect either stop or pivot. Our findings suggest that innovation-enabling structures alone are insufficient. Innovators must continuously use tactical combinations to create and sustain temporary space for play as leeway for innovation, generating emerging impacts that influence organizational contexts and shape subsequent project developments. We also contribute both conceptual refinements and empirical grounding to the mainly theoretical body of knowledge on organizational entrepreneurship and space for play

Disruptive but costly: how upside-down logos backfire in consumer responses to brands

Marketers are increasingly using unconventional design tactics to visually disrupt consumer expectations, like turning brand logos upside down. Across four experiments, this research examined how inverted logos influence consumer brand responses. In two binary choice tasks (Studies 1A and 1B), participants exhibited a lower preference for an inverted logo than a standard logo for branded products. Study 2 determined the psychological mechanism underlying this effect: inverted logos increase perceived unexpectedness, which increases perceptions of brand rebelliousness and, ultimately, reduces purchase intentions. Study 3 demonstrated that political ideology moderates this effect: more conservative, but not liberal, consumers respond negatively to inverted logos. Finally, we discussed the theoretical and practical implications for logo design and visual branding strategies

Social identity and capital income: a social psychological approach to identity economics using UK household data

Social identity research has yet to fully engage with identity economics. This article bridges the two by examining capital market participation and capital income inequality – a critical economic behaviour and a societal issue that remain understudied in social psychology. We integrate psychological concepts and metrics of social identity with large‐scale, representative UK data on household economics, encompassing 60,156 individuals and 130,598 observations from 2010 to 2023. Examining gender, ethnicity, education, occupation, politics, age and family as aspects of individuals' self‐concept, our findings show that between‐ and within‐person variations in these identities, beyond mere group memberships, were uniquely associated with both the presence and amount of capital income. Rather than reinforcing group membership effects, which could suggest adherence to group norms around capital market participation, our results highlight the importance of identity domains. Gender and ethnic identity were associated with lower capital income, whereas educational and political identity were linked to higher capital income. These patterns persisted across different groups and income strata. Importantly, the predictive power of social identities was comparable to traditional sociodemographic variables. This study extends social identity research to understudied economic behaviours and contributes to the emerging fields of identity economics and the psychology of inequality

Approximating maximum-size properly colored forests

In the Properly Colored Spanning Tree problem, we are given an edge-colored undirected graph and the goal is to find a properly colored spanning tree, i.e., a spanning tree in which any two adjacent edges have distinct colors. The problem is interesting not only from a graph coloring point of view, but is also closely related to the Degree Bounded Spanning Tree and (1,2)- Traveling Salesman problems, two classical questions that have attracted considerable interest in combinatorial optimization and approximation theory. Previous work on properly colored spanning trees has mainly focused on determining the existence of such a tree and hence has not considered the question from an algorithmic perspective. We propose an optimization version called Maximum-size Properly Colored Forest problem, which aims to find a properly colored forest with as many edges as possible. We consider the problem in different graph classes and for different numbers of colors, and present polynomial-time approximation algorithms as well as inapproximability results for these settings. Our proof technique relies on the sum of matching matroids defined by the color classes, a connection that might be of independent combinatorial interest. We also consider the Maximum-size Properly Colored Tree problem asking for the maximum size of a properly colored tree not necessarily spanning all the vertices. We show that the optimum is significantly more difficult to approximate than in the forest case, and provide an approximation algorithm for complete multigraphs

The social welfare value of the global food system

The global food system provides nourishment to most of the world’s eight billion people, generates trillions of dollars of goods and services, and employs more than one billion people. On the other hand, it generates substantial dietary health costs and environmental harms. Policymakers are asking about the overall contribution of the global food system to social welfare and how much larger it might be on a sustainable path. This paper describes our efforts to answer these questions. We couple multiple domain-specific models into a large-scale integrated assessment modelling framework capable of quantifying the outcomes of different food-system scenarios for incomes, health and the environment up to 2050, at a highly disaggregated level. We take these multi-dimensional outcomes and value them using a system of nested utility functions, building on recent work in environmental economics. We find that, relative to current trends, the bundle of measures in a Food System Transformation scenario would provide a large boost to global social welfare equivalent to increasing global GDP by about 7%. Changes in income, environment and health all contribute positively. Measures to change diets are particularly beneficial, although a caveat is that our welfare estimates exclude possible consumer disutility from dietary changes. The results are robust to changes in key utility/damage parameters

Sequential credit markets

Entrepreneurs typically seek financing in decentralized markets, where they approach investors sequentially. We develop a model of sequential capital markets with privately informed investors. The sequential market creates a dynamic adverse selection externality that leads to overinvestment and excessive rents to intermediaries, even as the number of competing investors becomes arbitrary large. The resulting rents lead to excessive entry of investors and insufficient entry of entrepreneurs. Moving to a centralized market structure or reducing transparency restores competitiveness but may harm efficiency. The model also explains how even a small skill advantage for an investor can lead to preferential deal flow and outsized returns

Green extractivism in Colombia: a scoping review on indigenous rights and livelihood impacts, and policy and social movement responses

We examine the impacts arising from net-zero related extraction of metals, mineral and clean energy on indigenous rights and livelihoods in Colombia, and identify policy and social movement responses. A scoping review method combined database searches in SCOPUS, Policy Commons and Overton with a grey literature search. In total, we screened abstracts and titles of 1050 documents, assessed 95 full-text records for eligibility, and included 34 documents for final review. We identified two core themes: green dispossession and renewable energy extraction impacts in La Guajira, sub divided into cultural, socio-political and environmental impacts; and resistance strategies to green extractivism, sub-divided into self-provision as part of a popular energy transition and holistic critiques to transition narratives and plans. National social movement responses were directed towards the left-wing government of Gustavo Petro, elected in 2022. International responses focussed on the coloniality of critical raw material extraction. Two main policy responses by the Petro government aimed to expand community access to energy services and create a Just Energy Transition roadmap. We conclude that Global South calls for the Global North to reduce resource consumption are becoming more prominent. Furthermore, we found some conceptual inconsistencies in this literature based on a routinisation of case studies and an epistemic poverty of dualistic social science concepts which tend not to consider non human actors in extractivist dispossession/degradation, especially in indigenous territories. We recommend future research employ relational theoretical frameworks to develop cultural analyses of extractivist dispossession/degradation, and diversify the Colombian geographical focus beyond La Guajira

Food choice with increased visibility - a field experiment at an environmental economics conference

Food choices and in particular meat consumption have major impacts on the local and global environment, which is why the topic is gaining attention in environmental economics and other disciplines. In this study, we investigate the effect of increased visibility on food choices, for which there has been little research to date. We present findings from a field experiment among researchers at a large environmental economics conference. When registering for the three-days conference and prior to choosing between vegan, vegetarian, or meat/fish lunches, half of the participants were informed that their choice would be visibly printed on their conference name badge. The remaining half were informed of this saliency only after their food choice (at the conference venue). Despite the conference setting in which environmentally friendly choices and signals are likely to be valued, we find no significant effect of the treatment on lunch choices. We discuss possible reasons for the null effect, including that the consequences of visibility are ignored, discounted, or already factored in

Digital trade, data protection and the EU adequacy club

Between 2000 and 2020, the EU granted 14 so‐called adequacy decisions, permitting EU citizens' personal data to flow freely between the EU and the respective trading partners, including among the countries accorded adequacy. Most adequacy decisions are unilateral, complementing the more commonly observed and analysed mutual recognition arrangements for technical regulations. Using structural gravity to assess the relationship between EU adequacy decisions and digital trade, and applying different approaches to define digital trade, we find that adequacy increases bilateral digital trade between the EU and the adequate countries by 7–9% compared to non‐digital trade. We also provide evidence of a ‘club effect,’ with digital trade increasing between countries that have been granted adequacy, but only to the extent that the USA is part of the club. Using synthetic control methods, we show that the magnitude of the club effect varies across countries