Exploring Universal Basic Income and Job Guarantee as Social Security Policy Responses to COVID-19 Challenges in South Africa

By mid-2020, South Africa had shredded 2.2 million jobs, and less than 40% of these had been recuperated by the end of the last quarter. Resultantly, COVID-19 has threatened people‘s aptitude to afford themselves and their families a passable standard of living, thus relying on social protection. In South Africa, social protection has been a topical theme in recent years, given that the existing approach has proved unsuccessful in convincingly reducing poverty, inequality and unemployment. Using a desktop review, this paper examined South Africa's social protection regime and its impact during COVID-19. It further explored the applicability of a Universal Basic Income and Job Guarantee in South Africa. The findings revealed that, while COVID-19 social security interventions may be considered sizeable, they have not been effective in offsetting the impact of poverty and unemployment during the COVID-19 pandemic. Consequently, the article provided policy intervention recommendations for social security post-COVID-19 in South Africa. Finally, as a caveat, given that the nature of the social policy discourse in South Africa is heavily shaped by political priorities and ideological preferences, whichever decision is adopted may likely depend on considerations of the above-mentioned factors.

How do banks’ capital regulation and risk-taking respond to COVID-19? Empirical insights of ownership structure

Purpose>This study aims to investigate the relationship between capital regulation and risk-taking behavior (financial stability) concerning the impacts of the recent global (COVID-19) crisis and diverse ownership structure.Design/methodology/approach>The analysis uses an unbalanced panel data set from 32 commercial banks of Bangladesh for 2000–2020. The authors use the two-step system generalized method of moments and three-stage least squares to produce the study outcomes.Findings>The robust results reveal that the relationship between capital regulation and risk (financial stability) is negative (positive) and bi-directional. More significantly, COVID-19 makes banks fragile and demands more capital to absorb risk. However, the effect of COVID-19 is heterogeneous when the authors consider ownership structure. Among the diverse ownership styles, Islamic and active shareholding show their controlling wheel on capital regulation and risk-taking aptitude (financial stability) during the global (COVID-19) crisis. In normal economic conditions, private banks and minority active shareholding can be a good determinant for capital regulation and risk (financial stability). On the other hand, state-owned and large banks have been found as less capitalized and highly risky.Originality/value>This study is the pioneer in exploring capital regulation and risk toward the recent global (COVID-19) crisis.

COVID-19 CRISIS AND TEACHERS' MICROPOLITICS OF ONLINE LEARNING IN ONE TERTIARY EDUCATION INSTITUTION IN LESOTHO

In 2020, because of the educational crisis caused by COVID-19 pandemic, one tertiary education institution in Lesotho decided to migrate teaching and learning to an online format. Such a shift sparked debates and controversies within the teaching staff of the university via both physical institutional spaces and online forums.. This study examines the content and nature of teacher talk as represented in online forums to critically analyse the concerns they raised, and to explaintheir response to the institutional decision using the conceptual lens of teachers' micropolitics The study used a qualitative approach for data collection and analysis. Three teachers' WhatsApp forums constituted the data source following ethical approval and participants' consent to use same. The transcripts were composed of about 60 000 hits that combined text, images, audio and video. This data was cleaned up to remove unwanted content which were hits in media formats other than text, and the content that was not related to institutional decision. Content analysis was applied to 2000 text hits that were found to be relevant for this study. The findings revealed that teachers were concerned about the institutional decision because they believed it was not well-thought out and was not taking into account their aptitude to teach online, and their limited access to ICT infrastructures and resources. From these findings, the study concluded that teachers were unhappy about online migration and therefore were unprepared to implement the institutional decision.