Africa-born migrants in Australia, particularly those who are racialised Black, face significant challenges in securing employment that aligns with their qualifications and experience, leading to higher rates of unemployment and underemployment compared to other population groups. This study explores the employment-seeking experiences of Black Africa-born migrants in South Australia, focusing on how coloniality – understood as the enduring power dynamics established during colonialism – shapes recruitment and selection processes. Drawing on focus group data from 32 participants, we examine how coloniality manifests through the devaluation of qualifications, racialized assumptions, and systemic barriers in the labour market. We argue that these processes reinforce a coloniality of employment selection, where Black Africa-born migrants are marginalised and relegated to lower-status roles. This research bridges macro-theorizing on coloniality with the micro-level experiences of job seekers, highlighting the need for coloniality-cognizant approaches to address these inequities in employment practices. The study contributes to a growing body of work that seeks to expose and challenge the ongoing reproduction of colonial power structures in contemporary labour markets.

Whilst Australia has a reputation for being a prosperous country with a high standard of living, data show that it is also characterised by significant happiness and wellbeing gaps across its population. This reflects the wellbeing challenges experienced by vulnerable and disadvantaged groups within its population - including Indigenous Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, refugees and newly arrived migrants, those living with a disability and those in aged care. These disadvantages are exacerbated by Australia’s unique geography, which imposes extremes in terms of distance and climate, thus creating additional wellbeing pressures for rural and remote communities - especially those affected by bushfires, floods and climate change. Finally, and in common with many other OECD countries, Australia’s wellbeing performance has been eroded by COVID-19 and by the blunt, contractionary monetary instruments used to control inflation - again, with the severest impacts experienced by those facing the greatest wellbeing challenges. Against this backdrop, this chapter will explore Australia’s complex wellbeing landscape and its specific institutional, economic, social and political obstacles to wellbeing.

Abstract GC Harcourt made many fundamental and essential contributions to the development of capital investment theory – most famously via his development of the Cambridge Capital Controversies, exposing conceptual and analytical flaws and contradictions in neoclassical approaches to defining and measuring capital. Relatedly, Harcourt also made essential contributions to our understanding of how accounting rules, used by real-world businesses to guide their investment decision-making, create anomalies and deficiencies in the accumulation of capital at a microeconomic level – with significant, deleterious consequences for the accumulation of capital at a macroeconomic level. In developing Harcourt’s contributions, this paper links Harcourt’s early insights about accounting rules with subsequent developments in behavioural economic models of business decision-making, thus aligning Harcourt’s contributions with insights from behavioural models of investment decision-making. These insights are then combined in showing how the misapplication of investment appraisal criteria at a microeconomic level contributes to under-investment and investment volatility in the macroeconomy, with negative implications for output, employment, labour productivity, wages and cyclical volatility.

Internationally, there is an urgent need to understand factors promoting successful settlement and integration of people with forced or voluntary migration experiences (i.e., refugee and non-refugee migrants). This paper provides a protocol of a mixed-methods investigation of contextual factors of successful settlement and service utilization of youth and their families, as young people could be at higher risk due to stressors associated with pre-migration trauma, post-migration settlement stressors, and adolescent development. This large-scale mixed-methods study will be conducted across three countries. A questionnaire survey will seek responses from 1200 youth aged 15-24 years residing in South Australia, Ontario, Canada, and California, United States of America. The qualitative component of the study will comprise 54 focus groups (324 participants) with youth and their parents/caregivers. The study design allows a range of important phenomena (e.g., different migration pathways and settlement countries) and key questions (e.g., regarding the intersection of migration, settlement, and wellbeing) to be addressed. It also allows for generalizability of findings to be tested across different communities and countries. Findings will support recommendations for policy and practice and may be generalized to advance research with youth and their families. This study is one of the largest, most comprehensive studies of youth settlement.

Abstract This article explores the job‐seeking experiences of Black African migrants in South Australia, focussing on the role played by social networks in labour market integration. While it has been long held that “who you know” matters when finding work, the quality and nature of interpersonal connections that can be put to use for job‐seeking purposes suggests that not all networks effectively leverage social capital when it comes to employment. This article argues that Africa‐born migrants in South Australia are a small, diverse population whose experiences of labour market integration are mediated by both reception (how they are received and perceived) and strategy and choice (decisions made by migrants themselves). There is evidence of these migrants’ evolving and expanding social networks; however, the strategy of building the “right” social networks only goes part‐way to addressing employment gaps, while racialised social hierarchies are embedded in the Australian labour market.

Each year the proportion of Australians who rent their home increases and, for the first time in generations, there are now as many renters as outright homeowners. Researchers and policy makers, however, know very little about housing conditions within Australia’s rental housing sector due to a lack of systematic, reliable data. In 2020, a collaboration of Australian universities commissioned a survey of tenant households to build a data infrastructure on the household and demographic characteristics, housing quality and conditions in the Australian rental sector. This data infrastructure was designed to be national (representative across all Australian States and Territories), and balanced across key population characteristics. The resultant Australian Rental Housing Conditions Dataset (ARHCD) is a publicly available data infrastructure for researchers and policy makers, providing a basis for national and international research.

OBJECTIVE: To review the evidence on the impact on measurable outcomes of performance-based incentives for community health workers (CHWs) in low- and middle-income countries. METHODS: We conducted a systematic review of intervention studies published before November 2020 that evaluated the impact of financial and non-financial performance-based incentives for CHWs. Outcomes included patient health indicators; quality, utilization or delivery of health-care services; and CHW motivation or satisfaction. We assessed risk of bias for all included studies using the Cochrane tool. We based our narrative synthesis on a framework for measuring the performance of CHW programmes, comprising inputs, processes, performance outputs and health outcomes. FINDINGS: Two reviewers screened 2811 records; we included 12 studies, 11 of which were randomized controlled trials and one a non-randomized trial. We found that non-financial, publicly displayed recognition of CHWs' efforts was effective in improved service delivery outcomes. While large financial incentives were more effective than small ones in bringing about improved performance, they often resulted in the reallocation of effort away from other, non-incentivized tasks. We found no studies that tested a combined package of financial and non-financial incentives. The rationale for the design of performance-based incentives or explanation of how incentives interacted with contextual factors were rarely reported. CONCLUSION: Financial performance-based incentives alone can improve CHW service delivery outcomes, but at the risk of unincentivized tasks being neglected. As calls to professionalize CHW programmes gain momentum, research that explores the interactions among different forms of incentives, context and sustainability is needed.

A Virtual Private Network (VPN) helps to mitigate security and privacy risks of data transmitting on unsecured network such as public Wi-Fi. However, despite awareness of public Wi-Fi risks becoming increasingly common, the use of VPN when using public Wi-Fi is low. To increase adoption, understanding factors driving user decision to adopt a VPN app is an important first step. This study is the first to achieve this objective using discrete choice experiments (DCEs) to elicit individual preferences of specific attributes of a VPN app. The experiments were run in the United Kingdom (UK) and Japan (JP). We first interviewed participants (15 UK, 17 JP) to identify common attributes of a VPN app which they considered important. The results were used to design and run a DCE in each country. Participants (149 UK, 94 JP) were shown a series of two hypothetical VPN apps, varying in features, and were asked to choose one which they preferred. Customer review rating, followed by price of a VPN app, significantly affected the decision to choose which VPN app to download and install. A change from a rating of 3 to 4–5 stars increased the probability of choosing an app by 33% in the UK and 14% in Japan. Unsurprisingly, price was a deterrent. Recommendations by friends, source of product reviews, and the presence of in-app ads also played a role but to a lesser extent. To actually use a VPN app, participants considered Internet speed, connection stability, battery level on mobile devices, and the presence of in-app ads as key drivers. Participants in the UK and in Japan prioritized these attributes differently, suggesting possible influences from cultural differences.