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Existing literature on health inequalities often overlooks the nuanced dynamics, particularly among vulnerable children with chronic diseases and disabilities and fails to consider regional disparities within countries like South Africa. This paper asserts the necessity for a more granular analysis in South Africa, recognizing the varied health outcomes for children across different economic segments and geographical settings. Specifically, the health trajectories for children differ markedly between rural formal areas, regions under traditional authorities, formal urban areas, and informal urban settlements. Addressing the generalizations common in prior research, this study takes a precise, regionally focused approach to socio-economic-driven disparities in chronic illness or disability. It distinguishes between rural formal areas, traditional authority areas, formal urban areas, and informal urban areas, unveiling the intricate layers of health disparities. Using data from the National Income Dynamics Study, concentration indices, and the Oaxaca-Blinder Decomposition method, the paper analyzed health inequality trends from 2008 to 2017. The results uncover significant inequalities, with alarming trends, particularly among children with chronic illnesses and disabilities in traditional authority regions and informal urban environments. The paper's evidence shows that rural formal areas have experienced a decline in health disparities as opposed to the deepening divide in traditional authority-led regions. The urban analysis reveals a split: while formal urban settings often favour the wealthier, informal urban areas indicate a shift towards lower socioeconomic brackets. The decomposition analysis highlights the evolving socioeconomic elements influencing each region over time. These insights emphasize the urgent necessity for geographically tailored policy interventions. By understanding the distinct socioeconomic landscapes across various regions, we can formulate policies that resonate with each area's specific realities and challenges. Such targeted strategies are essential in reducing health inequalities and enhancing the life quality of children with chronic health conditions and disabilities, playing a critical role in South Africa's journey toward comprehensive health equity. JEL Classification: I14 Keywords: Socioeconomic disparities, Chronic illness, Disability, South African children, Urban and rural variations, Health inequality, INTRODUCTION Globally, persistent health concerns and disabilities, including HIV and AIDS, respiratory ailments, undernourishment, and mental health issues, present considerable public health obstacles for children. A striking United Nations Children's [...]

It is widely held that smart contracts on a blockchain possess several unique properties, including immutability, disintermediation, and enhanced security, that can be advantageous to organizations. In particular, having these properties can enable smart contracts to benefit human resources departments in a number of ways, including applicant verification, tracking employee skills and tasks, and facilitating compensation. However, it is also reported that effectively implementing smart contracts involves a number of challenges to HR managers. To address these challenges, it would be valuable to establish criteria to help HR managers employ smart contracts successfully. The purpose of this paper is to develop a set of such criteria. The paper first provides an overview of the nature of blockchain and smart contracts and then, based on a review of relevant literature, describes how implementation of blockchain-enabled smart contracts in an HR department may benefit an organization by producing transaction cost savings through expediting processes, enhancing security, and reducing intermediaries. The paper then focuses on various challenges that have been identified in the literature to the successful use of smart contracts. These include issues regarding smart contract integrity, immutability, and security, as well as potential problems associated with a variety of legal issues. Synthesizing this information, the paper develops a set of best practice guidelines to help HR managers determine whether and how to employ smart contracts successfully for HR-related processes. The guidelines emphasize the importance of initial understanding and testing of planned smart contracts, protecting security by ensuring that only permissioned people can access smart contract data, and guaranteeing the integrity of smart contracts by paying very close attention to the translation of natural to programming language and establishing robust reviews of programmed contracts. Policy implications of the guidelines include the importance of HR departments ensuring that all employees who are involved in implementing the technology have a good understanding of the nature and capabilities of smart contracts, that robust methods be implemented to guarantee that the contracts are correctly programmed, and that HR managers keep abreast of legislative environment related to legal issues that may affect their department's use of smart contracts. JEL classifications: M12, M5, O33, L20 Keywords: Smart Contract, HRM, Blockchain technology, INTRODUCTION Utilizing smart contracts on a blockchain can improve processes common to human resource management (HRM), including refining applicant verification; accurately and securely tracking individual employees' skills, talents, and tasks; [...]

Existing literature on health inequalities often overlooks the nuanced dynamics, particularly among vulnerable children with chronic diseases and disabilities and fails to consider regional disparities within countries like South Africa. This paper asserts the necessity for a more granular analysis in South Africa, recognizing the varied health outcomes for children across different economic segments and geographical settings. Specifically, the health trajectories for children differ markedly between rural formal areas, regions under traditional authorities, formal urban areas, and informal urban settlements. Addressing the generalizations common in prior research, this study takes a precise, regionally focused approach to socio-economic-driven disparities in chronic illness or disability. It distinguishes between rural formal areas, traditional authority areas, formal urban areas, and informal urban areas, unveiling the intricate layers of health disparities. Using data from the National Income Dynamics Study, concentration indices, and the Oaxaca-Blinder Decomposition method, the paper analyzed health inequality trends from 2008 to 2017. The results uncover significant inequalities, with alarming trends, particularly among children with chronic illnesses and disabilities in traditional authority regions and informal urban environments. The paper's evidence shows that rural formal areas have experienced a decline in health disparities as opposed to the deepening divide in traditional authority-led regions. The urban analysis reveals a split: while formal urban settings often favour the wealthier, informal urban areas indicate a shift towards lower socioeconomic brackets. The decomposition analysis highlights the evolving socioeconomic elements influencing each region over time. These insights emphasize the urgent necessity for geographically tailored policy interventions. By understanding the distinct socioeconomic landscapes across various regions, we can formulate policies that resonate with each area's specific realities and challenges. Such targeted strategies are essential in reducing health inequalities and enhancing the life quality of children with chronic health conditions and disabilities, playing a critical role in South Africa's journey toward comprehensive health equity. JEL Classification: I14 Keywords: Socioeconomic disparities, Chronic illness, Disability, South African children, Urban and rural variations, Health inequality, INTRODUCTION Globally, persistent health concerns and disabilities, including HIV and AIDS, respiratory ailments, undernourishment, and mental health issues, present considerable public health obstacles for children. A striking United Nations Children's [...]

Unemployment remains a global challenge that requires additional ways of dealing with it. Therefore, the role of Reserve or Central Banks in reducing unemployment is of recent seeking more attention. This paper examines monetary policy shocks and unemployment nexus in the emerging market economies in Africa. The models of this study are designed within the panel vector autoregressive (PVAR) framework. The models majorly rely on the New Keynesian model. Given the nominal rigidities of the New Keynesian model, the monetary policy can therefore, serve as an important tool which can have a reasonable leverage on real variables. As claimed by Bernanke (2007) that the stance of monetary policy was appropriate to prevent deflation and high unemployment and as it has been empirically tested for developed economies, this paper provides a quantitative evaluation of an aspect of such statement in the context of emerging economies of Africa. We used annual data series on five emerging economies in Africa over the period 1991 to 2020, making 150 balanced panel data observations. The countries include, Egypt, Mauritius, Morocco, Nigeria and South Africa. The selection was based on those African countries identified as emerging markets by various international bodies such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), James O'Neill, Financial Times Stock Exchange (FTSE), S&P Global Ratings, EM Bond Index, Dow Jones, Russell, Columbia University and Cornell University. The findings of the study revealed that unemployment falls for at most four periods in response to contractionary monetary policy shocks while the response dissipates afterwards. Individually, unemployment rate in Mauritius and Nigeria rose in response to contractionary monetary policy shocks while in South Africa, Egypt and Morocco, it falls in response to contractionary monetary policy shocks. By and large, the results seem to show credence to the effectiveness of monetary policy in each country to achieve desired macroeconomic targets. The main implication of the results is that, expansionary monetary and fiscal policy undertaken by policymakers of emerging economies in Africa can enhance the labor market to recover from the downturns recently experienced in these economies. JEL Classifications: C33, E24, E52, O55 Keywords: Monetary policy shocks; Unemployment; Vector Autoregressions; Emerging Market Economies in Africa, INTRODUCTION Some economies of the world have recently been characterized by a transition from traditional economies, which heavily relied on agriculture and export of raw materials, to a more industrialized [...]

Several studies have used various datasets and methodologies to analyze the relationship between bilateral trade and income convergence among trading partners. However, most studies have not paid attention to the effect that income levels and nature of bilateral trade have on the speed of income convergence. In this paper, we argue that the income levels of trading partners and the nature of bilateral trade play important role in the relationship between bilateral trade and international income convergence. To account for the effect of income levels of trading partners, this paper presents an approach that explicitly accounts for bilateral trade among high-income (OECD) countries, bilateral trade between high-income and low-income (SSA) countries, and bilateral trade among low-income (SSA) countries. We also used total trade data for 25 OECD countries and 30 Sub-Saharan African countries over the period 1980-2018 to avoid the potential bias for selecting certain countries based on arbitrary percentage of trade relationship. We used the 2SLS estimations technique to avoid endogeneity problems due to the nature of the dataset. The paper finds that the bilateral trade-income convergence relationship for OECD to SSA is the strongest. This result throws light on the claim that the nature of bilateral trade between high-income and low-income countries promotes one directional knowledge spillover from high-income to low-income countries which enables low-income countries to adopt new technologies and grow faster than their high-income counterparts. Also, bilateral trade among OECD countries, which mostly comprises of differentiated products, promotes descent income convergence among them. However, bilateral trade among SSA countries has the least effect on income convergence. Findings of the study have important implications for bilateral trade among low-income countries and between low income and high income countries. First, if SSA countries want to develop and catch up with their rich counterparts, they should continue to promote free trade with high income countries by dismantling remaining protection policies. Second, the African Continental Free Trade Area's (AfCFTA) efforts to boost the manufacturing sector through industrialization is in the right direction to promote the production of more differentiated products in Africa which will create growth in income for member countries as they trade more. Finally, there is the need for SSA countries to increase investment rates and improve human capital accumulation to enable them to accelerate the adoption of new technologies and grow faster than their high-income counterparts, while bridging the income gap between them through trade. JEL Classifications: F11; F14; O33; O47 Keywords: Economic Openness; Income Convergence; Bilateral Trade; Economic Growth; 2SLS Estimator, INTRODUCTION The implications of international trade on income differential among trading nations have been professionally researched since the works of neoclassical growth theorists (Solow, 1956; Swan 1956) which generated the [...]

The manufacturing sector plays a strategic role as a major contributor to economic growth and development. However, the harsh business environment in Nigeria has constrained learning and capability building in the Nigerian manufacturing sector. The present state of the manufacturing sector underscores the need for firm-level learning and strategic policy actions. This paper utilized data from the Enterprise Survey Panel covering the periods 2007, 2009, and 2014/2015 to investigate firm learning and productivity in the Nigerian manufacturing sector. Case study illustrations were also undertaken to further provide insights into the links between learning variables and the productivity of selected firms in the sector. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics; dynamic panel model (DPM) via ordinary least squares (OLS) and General Method of Moments (GMM) techniques. The results of the estimation show there is a positive and significant relationship between export participation lagged by one period (t-1) and the current firm performance. A one-period lag of the learning variables, namely: skills and training increased the productivity of firms. The case study illustrations revealed that major learning capabilities include customer feedback; through employees, staff training/seminars/workshops, and supplier feedback. The paper provides evidence to conjecture that the STI mode of learning, which involves formal research and development (R&D) in firms is not deep enough, and that domestic firms have less productivity relative to firms with some proportion of foreign ownership. Also, some of the constraints to learning and productivity are an unstable regulatory environment, poor infrastructure and high cost of doing business. The paper recommends both formal and informal modes/mechanisms of learning are important to ensure improved productivity of manufacturing firms in Nigeria Also, learning opportunities may differ within and across manufacturing subsectors. Industry regulators or agencies should organize to provide a forum for firms and relevant stakeholders to regularly interact on learning experiences to learn from each other and collaborate to address obstacles to productivity. JEL Classifications: O14, O33 and D22 Keywords: Learning, innovation, productivity, manufacturing, Nigeria, INTRODUCTION The manufacturing sector of any economy plays a strategic role as a major contributor to economic growth and development. It holds the key to employment, income, and an improved [...]

It is undoubtedly accurate that there is a lack of parity in the WTO dispute system. Although the system has been lauded as being a rule-based adjudication system, developing country members and least-developed countries (LDCs) have to go to great lengths to protect their interests against a formidable trade partner. Remarkably, a few of them have successfully turned the tables with clever approaches in trade disputes against more resourceful and powerful members of the WTO. This paper adopts an exploratory qualitative research method using an in-depth analysis of six case studies of trade disputes between economies classified as 'weak' against economies classified as 'strong' members of the WTO. A total of 391 cases that were filed between 1995 and 2021 were first examined. Subsequently, out of 100 cases where developing countries participated in the WTO litigation as complainants, a total of 10 cases in which 'the weak' member prevailed. Six cases were chosen because they explicitly illustrate how the 'weak' WTO members harness their resources and unique winning tactics to overcome the 'strong' WTO members' ample supply of resources and aggressive tactics. The paper shows that governance effectiveness, influential alliances, public-private partnerships, government-NGO collaboration, engagement of academics and experts, effective use of the Advisory Centre on WTO Law (ACWL) coupled with effective leadership and clear plans were crucial for weak members' successful legal challenge at the WTO. These findings present promising tactics that WTO members could use to prevail in their trade disputes against a 'stronger' WTO member. They should, at best, inspire 'weak' members to overcome their hesitance to use the WTO judicial process to protect their interests either as parties or marginally as third parties. Indeed, the developing country members and LDCs have a variety of tools they can put to work when filing a dispute to help maximize the benefits and lower litigation costs. Chief among them is the AWCL. Our case analysis shows that ACWL's low cost has relatively attenuated 'weak' members' legal and financial stakes associated with a trade dispute. JEL Classifications: D57, F13, F14, F15, F23, O19, O24 Keywords: Dispute Settlement Understanding, WTO, International Trade, ACWL Corresponding Author's Email Address: mamoun.benmamoun@slu.edu, INTRODUCTION The World Trade Organization (WTO) is premised on the notion that 'the weak' and 'the strong' are treated equally. In theory, all member countries of the WTO are equal [...]

As an important part of corporate value, risk-taking has always been the focus of scholars. The existing research mainly focuses on the impact of corporate shareholders and managers' personal characteristics on corporate risk-taking, and few scholars study it from the perspective of regional environment. Based on the sample of Chinese A-share listed companies from 2006 to 2020, this paper empirically tests the impact of regional investment preferences on corporate risk-taking by using multiple regression methods; Then, the instrumental variables and propensity matching methods are used to test whether the main regression results have changed; Furthermore, this paper explores the mechanism of regional investment preference to reduce the level of corporate risk-taking; Finally, the impact of industry intensity and policy uncertainty on the main regression results will be tested in an expanded way. The research results show that the stronger the investment preference of the region where the company is located, the lower the company's risk-taking. After a series of robustness tests such as instrumental variable method and propensity score matching method, the main regression results of this paper remain unchanged. The mechanism test shows that regional investment preference can reduce managers' overconfidence and improve the quality of internal control, thereby reducing the level of corporate risk-taking. Further research shows that fierce industry competition and policy uncertainty can enhance the impact of regional investment preferences on corporate risk-taking. The research results not only enrich the research on the factors affecting enterprise risk-taking, but also deepen the theoretical understanding of the impact of the regional environment on corporate governance, which has certain reference significance for further improving corporate governance, optimizing corporate risk-taking and enhancing corporate value. JEL Classifications: G34, M14, O16 Keywords: Investment preference, Risk-taking, Overconfidence, Internal control, Corresponding Author's Email Address: Email: 810353126@qq.com, INTRODUCTION Risk-taking is an important link in the company's investment decision-making. It refers to the behavior tendency of the company to choose high-risk investment projects on the basis of weighing [...]

Deepening financial integration is important for developing economies especially in Africa, that accounts for less than 2% of the world's market capitalization. Financial integration facilitates risk sharing, aids the formation of larger markets which is beneficial to the firms and smoothens consumption inter-temporally. Financial integration will be enhanced through a well-developed financial sector that is all-inclusive of the economic agents in access to financial services at a low cost and at the most convenient time. The access to funds in an integrated market is further determined by the extent of financial knowledge acquired by the economic agents with respect to basic numeracy, interest compounding, understanding inflation and risk diversification. This paper examines the effect of increasing access to financial services and the level of knowledge of financial products on the financial integration of West African Monetary Zone. The ratio of total capital flows to GDP and interest rates on public debt were used in measuring financial integration while the measures of financial inclusion include the number of commercial bank branches, number of ATM machines available, Savings, number of account holders and credit to private sector. Data covering the period 1980--2020 were employed. Unit root test using Levin, Lin and chu t-test method and Im, et al statistics methods were employed while the cointegration test was conducted using the Wald t-test before the panel autoregressive distributed lag model estimation technique was used to estimate the models. The unit root test results revealed that three out of the ten variables were stationary at level whiles others were stationary at first difference. The Wald cointegration test shows that the two equations are cointegrated. The results from the study show that increasing the number of bank branches; the number of account holders; savings; credit to private sector and improvement in the level of financial knowledge with respect to financial services deepen financial integration of the West African Monetary Zone. The policy implication of the paper is that each economy's monetary authority and financial service providers must continue to advocate and institutionalise programmes that will deepen access to and knowledge of financial services, this will improve the extent of financial integration. JEL classifications: F36, E44 and C23 Keywords: Financial inclusion, financial literacy, financial integration, WAMZ panel autoregressive distributed lag model Contact author's email address: Email: oiwegbu@unilag.edu.ng, INTRODUCTION The capital and money market are very important markets which can promote sustained financial growth and development. The market is very important especially for developing economies in addressing its [...]

It is undoubtedly accurate that there is a lack of parity in the WTO dispute system. Although the system has been lauded as being a rule-based adjudication system, developing country members and least-developed countries (LDCs) have to go to great lengths to protect their interests against a formidable trade partner. Remarkably, a few of them have successfully turned the tables with clever approaches in trade disputes against more resourceful and powerful members of the WTO. This paper adopts an exploratory qualitative research method using an in-depth analysis of six case studies of trade disputes between economies classified as 'weak' against economies classified as 'strong' members of the WTO. A total of 391 cases that were filed between 1995 and 2021 were first examined. Subsequently, out of 100 cases where developing countries participated in the WTO litigation as complainants, a total of 10 cases in which 'the weak' member prevailed. Six cases were chosen because they explicitly illustrate how the 'weak' WTO members harness their resources and unique winning tactics to overcome the 'strong' WTO members' ample supply of resources and aggressive tactics. The paper shows that governance effectiveness, influential alliances, public-private partnerships, government-NGO collaboration, engagement of academics and experts, effective use of the Advisory Centre on WTO Law (ACWL) coupled with effective leadership and clear plans were crucial for weak members' successful legal challenge at the WTO. These findings present promising tactics that WTO members could use to prevail in their trade disputes against a 'stronger' WTO member. They should, at best, inspire 'weak' members to overcome their hesitance to use the WTO judicial process to protect their interests either as parties or marginally as third parties. Indeed, the developing country members and LDCs have a variety of tools they can put to work when filing a dispute to help maximize the benefits and lower litigation costs. Chief among them is the AWCL. Our case analysis shows that ACWL's low cost has relatively attenuated 'weak' members' legal and financial stakes associated with a trade dispute. JEL Classifications: D57, F13, F14, F15, F23, O19, O24 Keywords: Dispute Settlement Understanding, WTO, International Trade, ACWL, INTRODUCTION The World Trade Organization (WTO) is premised on the notion that 'the weak' and 'the strong' are treated equally. In theory, all member countries of the WTO are equal [...]

As an important part of corporate value, risk-taking has always been the focus of scholars. The existing research mainly focuses on the impact of corporate shareholders and managers' personal characteristics on corporate risk-taking, and few scholars study it from the perspective of regional environment. Based on the sample of Chinese A-share listed companies from 2006 to 2020, this paper empirically tests the impact of regional investment preferences on corporate risk-taking by using multiple regression methods; Then, the instrumental variables and propensity matching methods are used to test whether the main regression results have changed; Furthermore, this paper explores the mechanism of regional investment preference to reduce the level of corporate risk-taking; Finally, the impact of industry intensity and policy uncertainty on the main regression results will be tested in an expanded way. The research results show that the stronger the investment preference of the region where the company is located, the lower the company's risk-taking. After a series of robustness tests such as instrumental variable method and propensity score matching method, the main regression results of this paper remain unchanged. The mechanism test shows that regional investment preference can reduce managers' overconfidence and improve the quality of internal control, thereby reducing the level of corporate risk-taking. Further research shows that fierce industry competition and policy uncertainty can enhance the impact of regional investment preferences on corporate risk-taking. The research results not only enrich the research on the factors affecting enterprise risk-taking, but also deepen the theoretical understanding of the impact of the regional environment on corporate governance, which has certain reference significance for further improving corporate governance, optimizing corporate risk-taking and enhancing corporate value. JEL Classifications: G34, M14, O16 Keywords: Investment preference, Risk-taking, Overconfidence, Internal control,, INTRODUCTION Risk-taking is an important link in the company's investment decision-making. It refers to the behavior tendency of the company to choose high-risk investment projects on the basis of weighing [...]

Deepening financial integration is important for developing economies especially in Africa, that accounts for less than 2% of the world's market capitalization. Financial integration facilitates risk sharing, aids the formation of larger markets which is beneficial to the firms and smoothens consumption inter-temporally. Financial integration will be enhanced through a well-developed financial sector that is all-inclusive of the economic agents in access to financial services at a low cost and at the most convenient time. The access to funds in an integrated market is further determined by the extent of financial knowledge acquired by the economic agents with respect to basic numeracy, interest compounding, understanding inflation and risk diversification. This paper examines the effect of increasing access to financial services and the level of knowledge of financial products on the financial integration of West African Monetary Zone. The ratio of total capital flows to GDP and interest rates on public debt were used in measuring financial integration while the measures of financial inclusion include the number of commercial bank branches, number of ATM machines available, Savings, number of account holders and credit to private sector. Data covering the period 1980-2020 were employed. Unit root test using Levin, Lin and chu t-test method and Im, et al statistics methods were employed while the cointegration test was conducted using the Wald t-test before the panel autoregressive distributed lag model estimation technique was used to estimate the models. The unit root test results revealed that three out of the ten variables were stationary at level whiles others were stationary at first difference. The Wald cointegration test shows that the two equations are cointegrated. The results from the study show that increasing the number of bank branches; the number of account holders; savings; credit to private sector and improvement in the level of financial knowledge with respect to financial services deepen financial integration of the West African Monetary Zone. The policy implication of the paper is that each economy's monetary authority and financial service providers must continue to advocate and institutionalise programmes that will deepen access to and knowledge of financial services, this will improve the extent of financial integration. JEL classifications: F36, E44 and C23 Keywords: Financial inclusion, financial literacy, financial integration, WAMZ panel autoregressive distributed lag model Contact author's email address: Email: oiwegbu@unilag.edu.ng, INTRODUCTION The capital and money market are very important markets which can promote sustained financial growth and development. The market is very important especially for developing economies in addressing its [...]

This paper examines the effect of a visit by a country's leader to the U.S. on the ability to attract foreign loans. The difficulty is the issue of endogeneity. As the leader's visit may attract foreign loans, leaders may also be tempted to visit countries known to be major creditors. To deal with potential endogeneity, we introduce a novel instrumental variable for the number of leader's trips. The instrument is urban distance defined as the gap between the level of urban development in the country of the leader relative to that in the United States. We conduct a Two-Stage-Least-Squares estimation (2SLS) and the Limited Information Maximum Likelihood (LIML) estimation where the urban distance serves as a source of exogenous variation in leader's trips. The data for leader's trips is derived from the historical archives of the U.S. State Department. The estimation provides evidence of a statistically significant positive coefficient of leader's trips. This result implies that these trips by the leaders signal to the creditors their commitment to use the borrowed funds properly and to repay these funds in due time. Our results are robust even after the inclusion of other control variable, using alternative samples, and accounting for the potential of instrument weakness. Borrowers ought to consider the beneficial effect of a visit by their leaders to their creditors. These trips allow the leaders to present to foreign creditors the projects that need to be financed in their countries, to persuade them to extend a loan to their country with concessionary terms, to highlight the future benefits of the loan, and to reassure them of the abilityof the borrower to repay the principal and interest in due time. JEL Classifications : H63, H11 Keywords : External Debt, Executive, INTRODUCTION This paper examines the effect of the number of visits by the leader of the country or the head of the government to the United States on external debt. [...]

The impact of agricultural productivity growth on the process of structural change, an increase in the share of labor employed in manufacturing, is a much debated topic. One perspective argues that agricultural productivity promotes structural change via its contribution of various resources to the manufacturing sector. Another hypothesis proposed is that agricultural productivity growth will draw resources away from agriculture. This paper hypothesizes that agricultural productivity growth plays a key role in the structural change process, but not necessarily through the mechanisms usually proposed. It is hypothesized here that agricultural productivity growth improves the quality of human labor (measured by the human development index, human capital accumulation, and reductions in infant mortality). In turn, improvements in the quality of human labor make it more profitable to employ labor in manufacturing and thus structural change, measured by the share of manufacturing employment in total employment, increases. These hypotheses are tested using dynamic ordinary least squares (DOLS) techniques utilizing data from seventeen countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. The findings indicate that agricultural productivity growth has a significant positive impact human labor quality as measured by the human development index, human capital accumulation, and reductions in infant mortality. In addition, improvements in the quality of human labor in turn have a significant positive impact on the extent of structural change as measured by the share of manufacturing employment as a share of total employment. In addition, trade, as measured by exports plus imports divided by GDP, also has a significant positive impact on the extent of structural change. Finally, inflation appears to slow the structural change process. The policy implications are straightforward. Agricultural productivity does indeed seem to be important in the process of structural change. Thus development programs involving Sub-Saharan Africa should focus on investment in the development of agricultural technologies that will raise agricultural productivity. In a broader sense, governments should focus investment on improving the overall quality of labor. JEL Classifications: O1, O13, O14, O15 Keywords: agricultural productivity, structural change, human development, Africa, INTRODUCTION The primary objective of this paper is to analyze the impact of agricultural productivity on structural change (the shift of resources, in particular labor, out of agriculture and into [...]

An important macro-economic issue of developed and developing countries is how best to decompose an economic time series into permanent (trend) and transitory (cycle) components. The issue is vital in empirical macroeconomics since, among other things, it relates to how one can estimate the output gap-the deviation of an economy's output from its potential or trend output. This paper considers how well the unobserved components model and the Hodrick Prescott (HP) filter decomposes real gross domestic product (GDP) in a small island developing state, the state of Barbados. The correlated unobserved components model for Barbados studied in the Agbeyegbe (2020) is modified to allow a second-order Markov trend. The effect of this modification is to make it possible to recover the HP trend as a particular case. The paper then compares several methods useful for trend decomposition of real GDP in Barbados. The competing methods are variants of two widely used trend-cycle decompositions of GDP that give markedly different estimates. Namely, methods based on the unobserved components model (UC) and the HP filter. The correlated unobserved components model produces smaller output gaps in amplitude, whereas the HP filter generates significant and persistent cycles. More specifically, the methods are: (i) the HP filter; (ii) an augmented HP filter (HP-AR), that allows for cyclical components to be serially correlated, introduced by Grant and Chan (2017b); (iii) the correlated unobserved components model (UCUR), without a break; (iv) the correlated unobserved components model (UCUR-t), with a break at time t; and (v) a correlated unobserved components model that allows for a second-order Markov trend process UCUR-2M. The result shows that for Barbados, with data covering the period 1967-2017, the correlated unobserved components model that allows for a break in trend fits the data better than the HP specification. These results are significant from a policy perspective. Knowing the correct duration of the business cycle is essential to providing appropriate recommendations; the result argues against the use of HP-filter in analyzing Barbados' business cycle. The result also finds that for Barbados, it is empirically important to correlate permanent and transitory shocks. By ignoring this correlation, researchers risk providing a misleading analysis of how the Barbadian economy works. JEL Classifications: E31, C11, C15, and C22 Keywords: Bayesian model comparison, Barbados, Out-put Gap, Hodrick-Prescott filter, Unobserved Components., INTRODUCTION An important macro-economic issue of interest is how best to decompose an economic time series into permanent(trend) and transitory (cycle) components. Though the issue is often about real gross [...]

Although both central and state governments in India took the decisions to impose hard paternalistic policies of lockdown/shutdown to manage the spread of COVID-19, new cases were rising even after the first and second waves. Reverse migration, lack of social distancing, and failure to adhere to appropriate covid behavior are attributed as the leading cause of COVID-19 spread. The policy measures like Pradhan Mantri Gareeb Kalyan Yojana,' financial assistance, and series of lockdowns and shutdowns by the government of India have not significantly controlledthe spread of disease owing to a lack of understanding of individual's reaction to the pandemic and their reactive behavior. This paper used daily COVID-19 positive cases data to show the overall picture of COVID-19 in India. It used the explorative method to review articles related to behavioral biases involved in the decision-making process of migrant workers and individuals during the pandemic. The paper's findings show that different behavioral biases like base rate neglect, herd behavior, anchoring effect, availability bias are responsible for creating chaos, trauma, and anxiety among the migrant workers and leading to reverse migration in India. Despite knowing that COVID-19 is a fatal disease, some individuals' reaction to it was casual mainly because of hyperbolic discounting bias, optimism bias, overconfidence bias, confirmation bias, status quo bias, and loss aversion. Taking behavioral economics lessons, the paper suggests different nudging techniques for guiding people to maintain social distancing during this pandemic. Nudging has been proved to be an inexpensive tool in bringing desired behavioral changes in health economics. The paper concludes that nudging techniques can influence human behavior to control the spread of the disease. In the end, it gives direction for future work in this area to explore how behavioral economics can help policymakers to tackle the spread of infectious diseases such as COVID-19. JEL Classifications: D91 E71 I120 Keywords: COVID-19; Lockdown; Migration; Social Distancing; Behavioral Economics, INTRODUCTION In 2020, the world was come to a standstill due to the novel coronavirus, which spread like wildfire, adversely affecting every sphere of human life. India has been severely [...]

The role of social norms in forming aspirations is very important in developing countries where the women are mainly confined within the household. This has created a lack of demand for education among adolescent girls and a tendency to marry early. While governments have tried to remove gender disparity by increasing educational infrastructure for girls, it is well acknowledged that changing the sticky mindset is much more difficult and designing policies for this is a huge challenge. This paper tries to address this issue and estimates the impact of a celebrated conditional cash transfer (CCT), named Kanyashree Prakalpa (KP), on the aspirations of adolescent girls in West Bengal, India. KP, the conditional cash transfer scheme in West Bengal, India offers INR 25,000 (equivalent to US$330) to all girls who continue their education and remain unmarried till their 18th birthday. The study involves the use of both quantitative (like propensity score matching) and qualitative methods to establish that the CCT, through financial inclusion of adolescent girls, created a significant improvement in their aspiration scores. On the basis of a primary survey on 1050 households situated in three selected districts of the state, the study compares the aspiration scores of beneficiaries of the scheme, with those not availing the program after propensity score matching between the treatment and control groups. The study shows that the CCT, which was intended to prevent underage marriage and dropout among adolescent girls between thirteen to eighteen actually managed to change their mindset and enabled them to dream beyond marriage and envisage a future where they would be studying or working at the age of twenty five. The qualitative analysis complemented the quantitative results and found that KP eased the internal constraints of the adolescent girls through giving them access to their very own money in their bank account and this helped them to dream big. This paper, unlike other impact evaluations of CCTs, traces the impact of a aptly designed economic instrument of CCT on the mindsets of beneficiaries rather than economic outcomes. Though the pathway is essentially economic, it succeeded in assuaging a profound social and cultural barrier, thus offering new windows for policy makers in any developing country. JEL Classificatios: J16, J1, J18 Keywords: Aspiration, Early marriage, Social norms, Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT), Propensity score matching Corresponding Author's Email address: dutta.arijita@gmail.com, INTRODUCTION Lack of aspirations and their impact on gender disparity is now an established theory. In developing countries like India, this lack of aspiration translates to a high proportion of [...]

This paper uses the global vector autoregressive (GVAR) modelling approach to study (1) the effects of negative output shocks on Bangladesh's following trading partners on Bangladesh's economy: the United States, China, Eurozone, India and Saudi Arabia (2) positive global oil price shocks. To represent Bangladesh's macroeconomics, the GVAR model contains four key macroeconomic variables as endogenous variables. They are (1) real gross domestic product (GDP), (2) real exchange rate, (3) short-term interest rates, and (4) inflation. The specified GVAR model is estimated using quarterly data from 32 countries/regions from 1993Q4 to 2016Q4. The findings of this paper are consistent with theoretical predictions that external shocks can and will be transmitted to an open economy operating under a fixed or managed floating exchange rate system. For example, quantitatively, if the real output of Bangladesh's trading partners' falls by 1%, its output will fall by 0.39%, while the inflation rate of Bangladesh's trading partners' rises by 1%, and Bangladesh's inflation rate will increase by 1.38%. Although the negative output shock of the US economy will not significantly affect the Bangladeshi economy, the negative output shock of the Chinese economy will have a negative and significant effect on the Bangladeshi economy. The negative output shock on the US economy has caused the real exchange rate of Bangladesh's currency to appreciate and raised its short-term interest rate, although it is not statistically significant. Contrarily, a negative output shock to China or other economies devalues the real exchange rate of the Bangladeshi currency, although it is not statistically significant. However, Bangladesh's interest rates have not responded to negative output shocks from its trading partners (except the United States and Saudi Arabia), and they are not statistically significant. One policy implication of Bangladesh's inflation being overly sensitive to external inflation shocks is that Bangladesh can and should make its currency exchange rate more flexible to protect its economy from external price shocks. Unexpectedly, the external oil price shock did not seem to have a significant impact on the Bangladeshi economy. One explanation is that the impact of foreign inflation on Bangladesh's economy may have reflected the impact of oil prices. JEL Classifications: E32, E52, F36, F40. Keywords: External Shocks, GVAR Modelling, Bangladesh Economy. (*) Corresponding Author's Email Address: akhtar.hossain@newcastle.edu.au., INTRODUCTION Bangladesh is a small, open economy. It is exposed to both domestic and foreign shocks. Hence, any general shock to the global economy (e.g. an oil price shock) is [...]

Ensuring food security for the population is important for the quality of human capital to promote economic growth. Moreover, micro-credit can affect food security of the population, and the effect depends on the context; that is to say, being specific to countries and even regions within the same country. This paper investigates the role of micro-credit in attaining food security in Benin. The study makes use of the survey data from the 2017 Comprehensive Food Security and Vulnerability Analysis (CFSVA) of Benin. Two indicators, namely food consumption categories (poor, limit and acceptable) and food security classes (severe food insecurity, moderate food insecurity, limit food security and food security) are used to capture household food security. Owing to the ordered nature of the different categories of these two indicators, and the fact that access to micro-credit is not random and may be subject to selection bias (unobservable factors may affect financial inclusion), the paper relies on an extended ordered probit regression. In addition, the same type of model is used to investigate the effect of food purchase financing by micro-credit on food security. The findings show the endogenous nature of access to micro-credit, suggesting that the unobservable factors that increase the probability of having access to micro-credit reduce food consumption and increase food security. Moreover, the findings indicate that access to micro-credit has a positive effect on the food consumption categories, but the effect is negative on food security classes. For instance, access to micro-credit increases the likelihood of the household to have an acceptable food consumption and decreases that to have a limited food consumption and also that of a poor food consumption. In addition, using micro-credit for food purchases has a positive effect on food consumption categories and has no significant effect on food security. These findings suggest that policy-makers could intensify policies to improve access to micro-credit. In addition, ways in which households can stop diverting or reorienting micro-credit, as this sometimes negatively affects their food consumption category (poor) and their food security class (severity) could be examined. JEL Classifications: O12 and O16 Keywords: Micro-credit, food consumption, food security, endogenous treatment, extended ordered probit Contact author's email address: odilonboris@gmail.com, INTRODUCTION Food insecurity is one of the major concerns in low-income countries (Islam, Maitra, Pakrashi & Smyth 2016). Access to a quality diet is a necessary but not sufficient condition [...]

Several arguments have been raised about the tripartite relationship between capital inflows, trade openness and economic growth; and most especially on their role as economic stimulators. Despite the above, the role of capital inflows in the development process cannot be overemphasized since they ensure enhancement of technology transfer, efficiency and improvement in the quality of factor inputs. As alternative to aids and FDI, many West African countries embraced trade liberalisation policy with the belief that trade openness has the potential of enhancing economic growth by increasing the variety of intermediate inputs as well as the size of the domestic market. It is upon this premise that the current paper examines the individual, interactive and threshold effects of aid, FDI and trade openness on economic growth by employing panel autoregressive distributed lag (PARDL) and mean group (MG) estimation techniques on 14 West African countries using datasets from 1980 through 2018. The PARDL is adopted because of its dynamic nature and ability to obtain both short and long-term effects, while mean group technique records the uniqueness of individual West Africa countries and examine their degrees of sensitivity to regional characteristics. The results revealed that long run relationship was observed and aid, FDI and trade openness positively enhanced output growth. Second, the interactive effect of aid, trade openness and FDI was negative, but strengthens the individual effects in the long run period. Third, an average financial flows threshold of 8.3 percent is required to spur output growth to equilibrium. Fourth, MG estimation affirms that it is only in Senegal that the coefficients of these financial flow variables were sensitive to regional characteristics. These are the major contributions to knowledge. Thus, the paper recommends the need to embrace medium-and long-term policy framework which focuses on channelling funds from aid towards infrastructural and human development in order to accelerate future output growth. More so, regional representatives should concentrate efforts towards shifting their exports from primary to secondary and tertiary products so as to increase the value of trade transactions to members. Lastly, regional macroeconomic policies aimed at improving economic integration and regional sensitivity among members should be considered. JEL Classifications: F1 - F2 - F43 - C23 Keywords: Aid - FDI - Trade - Economic Growth - PARDL Corresponding author's email address: matthew.ogbuagu@fuoye.edu.ng, INTRODUCTION The role of financial flows in the development process cannot be overemphasized because growth models were developed around the assumption of adequate and frequent flow of resources (Barro & [...]

The stability of commercial banks operating in the MENA region is still questionable even though they have faced a drastic favorable change after 2008. Most of bank's regulatory capital are controlled by corrupted governmental officials which led banks in this region to increase their risktaking behavior at the expense of stability. This paper examines the impact of regulatory capital, economic, institutional, and political factors on the stability of commercial banks that are operating in the MENA region. The data employed in this study is a pooled cross-section and time series data of 13 banking system in the MENA region: Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Jordan, United Arab Emirates, Tunisia, Bahrain, Oman, Morocco, Egypt, Israel, and Turkey covering the period of 2000 to 2017. A dynamic Generalized-Method-of-Moments (GMM) estimator was adopted and a two-stage least squares (2SLS) regression method was conducted to check for robustness. Relying on the results of Hausman test, a fixed effects model was used. The following variables have shown a significant and positive relationship with bank stability; the equity (CAP), the profitability (ROA), the growth ([DELTA]GDP), and the dummy Basel II (BAS2) variables. The positive impact of both capital and Basel II requirements on bank stability supports the regulatory hypothesis. Conversely, nonperforming loans and bank's size negatively affected the stability of the banking sector. Regarding the institutional factors, the quality of governmental regulations and political stability have shown a positive relationship with bank's stability while the other variables (corruption, establishing new prudential rules, and freedom in speech) failed to show a significant relationship. The findings of this paper confirmed the progression of the additional capital requirements for MENA region banks. Moreover, a close supervision should be applied on large banks that might have the tendency to increase their risk-taking behavior to overcome the cost of the additional required capital. In additional, our findings verified that economic growth and operating environment play a crucial role on the stability of the banking sector. Finally, the results confirm that institutionallinked factors are more important than country-related regulations in enhancing bank's stability due to the presence of a well-designed Basel framework. JEL Classifications: E5, E52 and G21 Keywords: capital, bank stability, fixed effects model, MENA region banks, Contact author's email address: Email: mohammad.kassem@liu.edu.lb, INTRODUCTION Despite the outstanding changes experienced in MENA region in the last ten years, there are still issues of operational stability of banks in the region. Most bank capital are [...]

A sudden stop is the slowdown or cut-off of capital flows into an economy resulting in consumption and output collapses. Developing countries are known to experience this problem more frequently. The consensus in the literature is that these reversals are caused by poor economic management in these countries. While it is understandable that weak macroeconomic fundamentals lead to sudden stops, this paper shows that developing countries may face a sudden stop even when their macroeconomic indicators do not suggest one is imminent. A combination of certain factors can dry up funds for these countries: A unique borrower, borrowing at a significantly high level, pushing interest rates to the point where a developing country is not able to borrow due to credit rationing. The US has run a significant current account deficit over the last 30 years, borrowing far more than any other major economy. This paper analyzes the impact of the US deficits on developing countries that are trying to finance their projects. It provides regression results, then develops and simulates a theoretical model to investigate this. The Arellano-Bond dynamic panel-data regression results show that the US deficits are negatively associated with the current account deficits of the developing countries. The developing country loses its ability to borrow freely when the US's borrowing exogenously increases. The real business cycle model shows that this entry to the market causes a sudden stop-type effect even when the developing country is not experiencing any immediate problems in its economy. The simulation results show that the reduced borrowing opportunities for the current period and possibly future periods distort the production process and decrease welfare in developing countries. These results suggest that developing countries, when planning their projects and the related need for borrowing, need to be wary of these conditions in addition to their own situation. Moreover, when a sudden stop occurs, international institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank should be cautious. They should examine whether the sudden stop was the result of poor planning and macroeconomic conditions or the result of an external factor such as the US increasing its borrowing to crowd out other borrowers. JEL Classifications: F00, G15 and F32 Keywords: Current Account Deficits, Sudden Stops, Welfare, Developing Countries, the US Corresponding Author's Email Address: n.ozdemir@unf.edu, INTRODUCTION A sudden stop is the slowdown, or cut-off of capital flows into an economy, which is typically accompanied by consumption and output collapses. It could be caused by foreign [...]

Volatility is an essential parameter in risk management applications, and it can affect economic activity and public confidence. It is also a key parameter in several studies examining the link between the stock market, economic growth, and other financial variables. This paper seeks to broaden our understanding of volatility in a Small Island Developing State capital market by conducting a Bayesian model comparison of several volatility models for modeling stock returns on the Jamaica Stock Exchange (JSE). The paper uses a formal Bayesian model comparison methodology to compare seven generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedastic (GARCH) type models and seven stochastic volatility (SV) type models using the daily JSE index, All Items, from January 03, 2012, December 31, 2019, from the Jamaica Stock Exchange Database. The models include the standard models of GARCH(1,1) and SV with an AR(1) log-volatility process and models with jumps, volatility in mean, leverage effects, heavy-tailed distribution, and moving average innovations. The results reveal that SV models generally fit the data better than their GARCH counterparts. The heavy-tailed distributed innovations and the jump component substantially improve the performance of the basic GARCH and SV models. It also finds that allowing for the moving average component improves the fit of both GARCH and SV models. The result also indicates that volatility feedback is essential. There is also evidence of a significant inverse leverage effect. In total, the SV model with Student-t innovations is the best. The result presented has a potential value for academics, policymakers, and practitioners. For academics, the evidence of the dominance of the SV models over their GARCH counterparts would suggest that spillover studies involving Jamaica would gain from adopting the SV specification. The result presented also has a potential value for the Bank of Jamaica (BOJ). The BOJ can adopt the SV-t framework rather than a GARCH framework as a tool for gauging volatility in the JSE. Lastly, using the SV model to compute volatility would provide more accurate pricing and risk management results for practitioners, especially global fund managers who plan to include JSE stocks for asset allocation. JEL Classifications: E31, C11, C15, and C22 Keywords: Bayesian model comparison, Jamaica, stocks, moving average, jumps, leverage, GARCH, stochastic volatility. Contact author's email address: Email: tagbeyeg@hunter.cuny.edu, INTRODUCTION This paper deals with modeling the volatility of stock returns on the Jamaica Stock Exchange (JSE). The statistical modeling of volatility returns can yield insights into valuable trading opportunities [...]

Acts of terrorism have increased markedly in recent decades. Social analyses have found terror-related events to be associated with nationwide increases in fear, panic, and uncertainty amongst individuals and businesses who play a major role in the stock market. The current paper intends to contribute to the established literature by quantitatively examining the impacts of terrorist attacks on financial market volatility by conducting an in-depth case study of the Sri Lankan stock market during and after the civil war (1986-2017). Sri Lanka serves as an excellent natural experiment for the current study due to the sustained length and severity of the terrorist attacks between 1983 and 2009. Five forms of terror variables: (i) cumulative number of deaths; (ii) cumulative number of victims injured; (iii) number of fatalities; (iv)number of injured, and (v) a terror dummy variable were utilized in modeling the stock market volatility. This paper uses autoregressive conditionally heteroscedastic (ARCH), and generalized autoregressive conditionally heteroscedastic (GARCH) methods to model the stock market volatility. The method is consistent with the assumption that the innovations from stock returns models contain a fixed unconditional variance, but the conditional variance varies. The findings of this paper suggest that terror attacks, in general, have exerted a significant effect on stock market volatility in Sri Lanka during the conflict period. Surprisingly, extrinsic factors of terror-related events such as the number of people injured or killed due to terrorist attacks were not found to be statistically significant jointly or separately in the conditional volatility equation, thus making it difficult to form a clear interaction among the variables. Investors seem to concern themselves more about the risk of instability which manifests as a result of terror-related events rather than the human cost of such events. The findings of this paper may be useful in improving the accuracy of future volatility prediction models. They could also be relevant in evaluating military sector projects that aim to boost investor confidence. JEL Classifications: C58, G15, N25 Key Words: Market Volatility, Sri Lanka, Terrorist Incidents Contact Author's email address: albert.wijeweera@ku.ac.ae, INTRODUCTION Acts of terrorism have increased markedly in recent decades. Social analyses have found terror-related events to be associated with nationwide increases in fear, panic, and uncertainty amongst individuals and [...]

Access to electricity accelerates the pace of social and economic development of a country in addition to boosting the overall living standard of people. Ensuring universal access to electricity remains a challenge in Bangladesh because the households outside electricity coverage are often poor and/or reside in remote or rural areas. This paper empirically examines the causal impact of rural electrification on the household welfare of life-line or lowest-tier electricity consumers of rural Bangladesh who are mainly lower-income households group. We use the Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies (BIDS) 2018 household survey data, collected from villages with and without access to electricity. The sample consists of 511 electrified and 325 non-electrified households as well as covers all eight divisions of the country to account for geographical variations. We employ a recently developed quasi-experiment econometric method, namely the Covariate Balancing Propensity Score (CBPS) method, which simultaneously optimizes covariate balance and estimates propensity scores as well as account for non-random selection of treatment households (electrified households). The analysis indicates the robust impact of rural electrification on economic and educational outcomes for the lowest-tier electricity consumers of rural Bangladesh. Electrification contributes to 81% (about 2.10 liter/month) reduction of kerosene consumption per household per month. Considering this reduction, we find that the connection of electricity under life-line program contributes to about 0.24 million tons' reduction in C[O.sub.2] emission at the national level in each year. The average treatment effect of electrification on weekly working hours of household earning members is found to be positive and significant--weekly working hours increase by about 2.21 hours. With regard to educational outcomes, time spent on evening studies by boys and girls increases by about 21 minutes and 18 minutes per day, respectively, due to electrification. Overall, the paper provides valuable insights regarding the benefits of rural electrification in a setting with low electricity consumption and justifies the case for continued subsidized electrification program for the lowest-tier electricity consumers in Bangladesh. JEL Classifications: O12; O13; O18; Q48 Keywords: impact of rural electrification, life-line consumers, lower-income households, covariate balancing propensity score (CBPS), average treatment effect on the treated (ATT), Bangladesh., INTRODUCTION The Goal-7 of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) declared by the United Nations (UN) is to 'ensure universal access to affordable, reliable, and modern energy services by 2030' (1). [...]

Reverse flows characterize a situation in which external inflows, such as remittances, are used to service external debt, finance capital flight, and/or accumulate foreign reserves. The existing literature on the impact of remittances in developing countries suggests that remittances are used for consumption and/or investment. However, the ultimate development effect of remittances will depend on how much of this external flow is absorbed domestically. If all remittances are not used for domestic consumption and/or investment, the residual amount will flow out of the country in the form of reverse flows. The objective of this paper is to identify the long run amount of reverse flows out of remittances in Jamaica, one of the largest recipient of remittances in the Caribbean. To examine the relationship between remittances and reverse flows in Jamaica, we estimate a net exports equation using the autoregressive distributed lag technique. We then calculate the marginal effect of remittance on reverse flows from the estimated remittance coefficient in the net exports equation. The dataset used in the paper covers the period 1976 to 2017. This determination is a first for Jamaica. The central finding is that, in the long run, approximately $0.24 of every dollar of remittances is used to finance reverse flows. Therefore, only 76 percent of any additional amount of remittances is domestically absorbed in the form of consumption and/or investment in Jamaica. These results suggest that the ultimate development impact of remittances will be overstated if reverse flows out of remittances are not taken into account. Our results echo earlier findings in the existing literature on reverse flows. The overarching policy implication of our finding is that policymakers should design growth policies of remittances after considering its reverse flow impact. Future research should focus on the reverse flow impacts of other external flows such as foreign aid. Further, future research should also identify reverse flows for other Caribbean countries. These findings are not only important for Jamaica but also have significance for other remittance-recipient developing countries. Keywords: Remittances, reverse flows, Jamaica, ARDL, INTRODUCTION Remittance inflows as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in Jamaica are relatively large when compared to other small island developing states. This is reflective of the country's [...]

Agriculture plays a vital role in driving economic output and employment in Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries. Despite some progress, agricultural productivity in SSA still lags behind other regions. Limited access to finance remains a significant impediment to improving agricultural productivity in Sub-Saharan Africa. This paper investigates the effect of financial proximity on agricultural productivity in Sub-Saharan African countries. The study primarily employs the system GMM estimator, chosen to address the endogeneity issue typical in macro panel data. This method is also well-suited to our study because it accommodates a high number of cross-sections relative to the number of periods within each cross-section. Additionally, the IV-2SLS method is employed to check the robustness of the findings. The study uses an unbalanced panel for the 36 African countries with data for the period 2004-2019. Our findings show that increasing the financial proximity favors agricultural productivity in SSA countries. Specifically, the number of commercial bank branches (CBB) and the number of automated teller machines (ATM) per 100 000 adults, as indicators of financial proximity, have positive and significant effects on agricultural value added per worker in SSA. Additionally, our findings show that rainfall, arable land, and institutional quality are robust determinants of agricultural productivity. The positive effects of the number of CBB and the number of ATM are even more pronounced on agricultural productivity when coupled with strong institutional quality. Our findings suggest that improving financial services' accessibility in rural areas, coupled with enhanced institutional quality, regular rainfall, ample arable land, and increased access to water and land, are pivotal steps for achieving sustainable enhancements in labor productivity. This, in turn, leads to increased returns through value-added growth and expanded employment in the agricultural sector. JEL Classifications: G21, Q14, Q18 Keywords: Financial inclusion, Financial proximity, Agricultural productivity, Sub-Saharan Africa, INTRODUCTION Agriculture is a key contributor to economic output and the leading source of employment among Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) countries, contributing 4 times more to regional gross domestic product (GDP) [...]

The labor force constitutes a paramount factor of production in the realm of business operations. In the past, China's abundant labor force significantly boosted productivity for firms. However, as the demographic dividend gradually wanes, concerns have arisen regarding a scarcity of labor force, exacerbating worries about rising labor costs. Therefore, focusing on enhancing firms' labor investment efficiency becomes pivotal. Using a sample of A-stock listed firms in China from 2013 to 2020, we examine the impact of customer concentration on the labor investment efficiency of supplier firms. Prior literature provides mixed results regarding the effect of concentrated customers. They can act as a governance mechanism for reducing agency problems, thus, increasing investment efficiency. Conversely, agency problems are aggravated in suppliers with concentrated customers, consequently, reducing investment efficiency. Our results suggest that customer concentration reduces labor investment efficiency, and this effect is more pronounced when customers possess high bargaining power. Additionally, the mechanism analysis reveal that customer concentration leads to less accurate information disclosure, higher operating risk, and an incentive to 'empire building', reducing labor investment efficiency. The cross-sectional analysis reveals that customer concentration results in both over- and under-investment in labor, thereby reducing investment efficiency. In addition, we employ augmented models to rule out the possibility of a U-shaped relationship between customer concentration and labor investment efficiency. Furthermore, we adopt the instrumental variables approach as well as a two-stage regression model to address potential endogeneity concerns and mitigate the omitted variable concern. Our results hold after the robustness tests and endogeneity tests. The findings of this paper imply that firms should strategically diversify their customer bases, thereby reducing their reliance on a few large customers. Simultaneously, governments should actively encourage firms to broaden their customer base. It can help enhance labor investment efficiency by spreading the risks associated with customer concentration. Moreover, it is crucial to acknowledge that substantial customer bargaining power can negatively impact supplier firms. Thus, policymakers should promote antitrust regulations and fair trade practices to mitigate the high bargaining power of large customers. JEL Classifications: G31, E22, J20 Keywords: Customer concentration, Agency problems, Business risk, Labor investment efficiency, INTRODUCTION Labor constitutes a fundamental resource for firms' production and operational activities, holding significant implications for both macroeconomic growth and the competitiveness of micro-firms (Atanassov and Kim, 2009; Jung et [...]

Poverty remains a serious problem in Nigeria; women are among those mostly affected and are often deprived in many ways. This paper uses the multidimensional approach to examine poverty levels among women in Ibadan South West Local Government Area, Oyo State. Primary data was obtained from a sample of 393 women across the population density areas on socio-economic characteristics and poverty indicators (health, education and standard of living). The Alkire-Foster multidimensional approach was used to estimate the multidimensional poverty index (MPI) for the sampled women. The weights assigned to these poverty dimensions were generated using the multiple correspondence analysis. The MPI for each woman were categorized as abject poor (deprived in at least two dimensions), moderate poor (deprived in one dimension) and non-poor (not deprived in any dimension). The mean age of the women was 30.8[+ or -]6.7 years. One-third of the respondents were mostly artisans (30.0%) and traders (26.5%), and 52.2% had completed secondary education. About 23.0% of women were deprived in education, 61.0% in health and 70.4% in standard of living. Based on location, the study indicated that the women in the medium and high density areas are mostly deprived in the different dimensions of poverty. When the poverty cut off K= 1, poverty incidence is 94% and 51.7% of the women were multidimensional poor as against 28% poverty incidence and 19.6% poor women when k=3 using the Alkire-Foster Multidimensional methodology. This implies that when women are deprived in at least one dimension; 51.7% are multidimensional poor. More than half of the respondents (51.0%) were categorized as moderately poor, 26.0% were abject poor while 23.2% were non-poor. This study revealed high poverty levels among women in Ibadan South West Local Government Area. Deprivation in standard of living and health in the three areas could be improved upon through the concerted effort of the government with appropriate ministries by initiating more productive and empowerment programs to improve their purchasing power and disseminating educative information that will improve their nutritional status through health talks to reduce the level of multidimensional poverty in urban locations respectively. JEL Classifications: D33, J16, N37 Keywords: Multidimensional poverty, women, Alkire and Foster, INTRODUCTION Poverty refers to an undesirable state which endangers life, and considering its universal occurrence, it is referred as the principal developmental challenge of many nations across the globe over [...]

Agriculture plays a vital role in driving economic output and employment in Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries. Despite some progress, agricultural productivity in SSA still lags behind other regions. Limited access to finance remains a significant impediment to improving agricultural productivity in Sub-Saharan Africa. This paper investigates the effect of financial proximity on agricultural productivity in Sub-Saharan African countries. The study primarily employs the system GMM estimator, chosen to address the endogeneity issue typical in macro panel data. This method is also well-suited to our study because it accommodates a high number of cross-sections relative to the number of periods within each cross-section. Additionally, the IV-2SLS method is employed to check the robustness of the findings. The study uses an unbalanced panel for the 36 African countries with data for the period 2004-2019. Our findings show that increasing the financial proximity favors agricultural productivity in SSA countries. Specifically, the number of commercial bank branches (CBB) and the number of automated teller machines (ATM) per 100 000 adults, as indicators of financial proximity, have positive and significant effects on agricultural value added per worker in SSA. Additionally, our findings show that rainfall, arable land, and institutional quality are robust determinants of agricultural productivity. The positive effects of the number of CBB and the number of ATM are even more pronounced on agricultural productivity when coupled with strong institutional quality. Our findings suggest that improving financial services' accessibility in rural areas, coupled with enhanced institutional quality, regular rainfall, ample arable land, and increased access to water and land, are pivotal steps for achieving sustainable enhancements in labor productivity. This, in turn, leads to increased returns through value-added growth and expanded employment in the agricultural sector. JEL Classifications: G21, Q14, Q18 Keywords: Financial inclusion, Financial proximity, Agricultural productivity, Sub-Saharan Africa, INTRODUCTION Agriculture is a key contributor to economic output and the leading source of employment among Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) countries, contributing 4 times more to regional gross domestic product (GDP) [...]

The labor force constitutes a paramount factor of production in the realm of business operations. In the past, China's abundant labor force significantly boosted productivity for firms. However, as the demographic dividend gradually wanes, concerns have arisen regarding a scarcity of labor force, exacerbating worries about rising labor costs. Therefore, focusing on enhancing firms' labor investment efficiency becomes pivotal. Using a sample of A-stock listed firms in China from 2013 to 2020, we examine the impact of customer concentration on the labor investment efficiency of supplier firms. Prior literature provides mixed results regarding the effect of concentrated customers. They can act as a governance mechanism for reducing agency problems, thus, increasing investment efficiency. Conversely, agency problems are aggravated in suppliers with concentrated customers, consequently, reducing investment efficiency. Our results suggest that customer concentration reduces labor investment efficiency, and this effect is more pronounced when customers possess high bargaining power. Additionally, the mechanism analysis reveal that customer concentration leads to less accurate information disclosure, higher operating risk, and an incentive to 'empire building', reducing labor investment efficiency. The cross-sectional analysis reveals that customer concentration results in both over- and under-investment in labor, thereby reducing investment efficiency. In addition, we employ augmented models to rule out the possibility of a U-shaped relationship between customer concentration and labor investment efficiency. Furthermore, we adopt the instrumental variables approach as well as a two-stage regression model to address potential endogeneity concerns and mitigate the omitted variable concern. Our results hold after the robustness tests and endogeneity tests. The findings of this paper imply that firms should strategically diversify their customer bases, thereby reducing their reliance on a few large customers. Simultaneously, governments should actively encourage firms to broaden their customer base. It can help enhance labor investment efficiency by spreading the risks associated with customer concentration. Moreover, it is crucial to acknowledge that substantial customer bargaining power can negatively impact supplier firms. Thus, policymakers should promote antitrust regulations and fair trade practices to mitigate the high bargaining power of large customers. JEL Classifications: G31, E22, J20 Keywords: Customer concentration, Agency problems, Business risk, Labor investment efficiency, INTRODUCTION Labor constitutes a fundamental resource for firms' production and operational activities, holding significant implications for both macroeconomic growth and the competitiveness of micro-firms (Atanassov and Kim, 2009; Jung et [...]

Poverty remains a serious problem in Nigeria; women are among those mostly affected and are often deprived in many ways. This paper uses the multidimensional approach to examine poverty levels among women in Ibadan South West Local Government Area, Oyo State. Primary data was obtained from a sample of 393 women across the population density areas on socio-economic characteristics and poverty indicators (health, education and standard of living). The Alkire-Foster multidimensional approach was used to estimate the multidimensional poverty index (MPI) for the sampled women. The weights assigned to these poverty dimensions were generated using the multiple correspondence analysis. The MPI for each woman were categorized as abject poor (deprived in at least two dimensions), moderate poor (deprived in one dimension) and non-poor (not deprived in any dimension). The mean age of the women was 30.8[+ or -]6.7 years. One-third of the respondents were mostly artisans (30.0%) and traders (26.5%), and 52.2% had completed secondary education. About 23.0% of women were deprived in education, 61.0% in health and 70.4% in standard of living. Based on location, the study indicated that the women in the medium and high density areas are mostly deprived in the different dimensions of poverty. When the poverty cut off K= 1, poverty incidence is 94% and 51.7% of the women were multidimensional poor as against 28% poverty incidence and 19.6% poor women when k=3 using the Alkire-Foster Multidimensional methodology. This implies that when women are deprived in at least one dimension; 51.7% are multidimensional poor. More than half of the respondents (51.0%) were categorized as moderately poor, 26.0% were abject poor while 23.2% were non-poor. This study revealed high poverty levels among women in Ibadan South West Local Government Area. Deprivation in standard of living and health in the three areas could be improved upon through the concerted effort of the government with appropriate ministries by initiating more productive and empowerment programs to improve their purchasing power and disseminating educative information that will improve their nutritional status through health talks to reduce the level of multidimensional poverty in urban locations respectively. JEL Classifications: D33, J16, N37 Keywords: Multidimensional poverty, women, Alkire and Foster, INTRODUCTION Poverty refers to an undesirable state which endangers life, and considering its universal occurrence, it is referred as the principal developmental challenge of many nations across the globe over [...]

Social scientists have extensively studied the causes of good institutions, including the origins of economic freedom. Results concerning the causes of different kinds of institutions are often similar, often concluding that the geography, environment, and culture are important factors. However, a recent political economy framework suggests that certain dimensions of economic freedom, namely specific dimensions of the size of government (government consumption, transfers and subsidies, and the top marginal tax rate), differ systematically from other dimensions of liberalization. This paper explores these arguments by constructing an index of a set of consensus predictors of institutional quality: ethnic fractionalization (predicts negatively), the natural log of the population size (negatively), absolute latitude (positively), natural resource rents (negatively), the presence of the country in the Americas (negatively), British legal origins (positively), the presence of the country in Eurasia (positively), and island geography (positively). The countries with the 'best' fundamentals for institutional quality are Iceland, Ireland, Malta, Finland, and Cyprus, while the five with the 'worst' fundamentals are Angola, Nigeria, Chad, Burkina Faso, and Ghana. It then takes this index of 'fundamentals' of institutional quality and shows that, although they predict economic liberalism as a whole (as measured by the Economic Freedom of the World index) as they would predict other measures of institutional quality, they predict oppositely (i.e., corresponding to larger governments) for the dimensions of the size of government listed above. The result is congruent with the predictions of the political economy model. Additionally, this result is not contingent on the inclusion of any one of the 'fundamental' variables, although natural resource rents and absolute latitude appear to be the most important variables. Countries with considerably more economic freedom than would be predicted by their fundaments include Peru, Singapore, the United States, Chile, and Canada; should deviations from fitted values be seen as presaging future movements in institutions, these countries are the most likely to see upcoming declines. The aforementioned political economy model implies that these findings are the result of complexities involved in the interaction between state capacity and different dimensions of economic liberalization. JEL Classifications: P17, O43, and D70 Keywords: Institutional Development; Economic Freedom, INTRODUCTION There is extensive scholarship on the origins and causes of economic freedom (Lawson, Murphy & Powell 2020), one dimension of institutional quality. The broader literature on institutions often points [...]

This paper takes a closer look at the well-researched topic of the determinants of health expenditure. However, as an improvement over previous studies, the current study tested the cost disease hypothesis in the healthcare sector in sub--Saharan Africa to assess the sector's productivity. The cross-sectional units in the current study comprise forty-eight sub-Saharan African countries; spanning the period 2000 to 2020. The data was sourced from two main sources; namely, World Development Indicators and the ILOSTAT. The main variable of interest (Baumol variable) was constructed using a combination of various variables. The methodology relied on several econometric techniques i.e., fixed effect, random effects and two-stage least square estimations. The growth rate of gross fixed capital formation was used to control for the potential reverse causation between the growth rate of health expenditure per capita and the Baumol variable. Based on the empirical results from the various estimations, it appears that there is some evidence of the presence of the cost disease in the healthcare sector of sub--Saharan Africa. This effect became stronger when the endogeneity in the model was taken into consideration. However, this effect became greatly diminished after the growth rate of GDP per capita and the growth of the price level were introduced in the model. The statistical significance of the growth rate of these variables reinforces their important roles in the determination of the levels and growth in health expenditure. The confirmation of the basic Baumol model in determining the growth of health expenditure suggests that the growth of health expenditure in sub-Saharan Africa might be a result of health workers' wages outstripping productivity in the sector. This suggests that the inelastic nature of the demand for health care is the main driver of the growth of health expenditure; thus might not be reflected in improved health care. Furthermore, policymakers need to consider changes in the price level as it may deflate the real value of the budgetary amount. JEL Classifications: C12; C23; I10; O41 Keywords: Health Expenditure, Unbalanced growth, sub--Saharan Africa panel., INTRODUCTION In the discussions of the determinants of health expenditure, income is an important contributor to the levels of health expenditure (Ekpenyong, 2022). However, some underlying conditions might be driving [...]

This paper attempts to estimate if credit access can discipline the borrower in terms of consumption of goods like tobacco and alcohol, using a large scale agricultural credit reform from India. While such evidence of disciplining behaviour exists for group lending and microfinance programs, there is very little known about this for more formal and large scale credit programs. This paper uses a triple difference identification strategy exploiting exogenous variation in the reach of the program generated by institutional features and coverage intensities. Essentially, the methodology relies on differences in mean outcomes between districts having more banking infrastructure and the ones having less number of banks, states that are politically aligned with the centre versus ones that are not and states that have high initial program penetration with states that are laggards in implementation. The idea is that in the absence of the actual policy variation, these triple differences would be statistically indistinguishable from zero. The paper relies on nationally representative household survey data from India for the analysis. The findings suggest that access to credit leads to a decline in consumption expenditure on temptation goods such as tobacco and other intoxicants but increases expenditure on necessary items such as food. While usually such results are explained by the presence of strict monitoring regimes in institutions such as microfinance, in our case because there is no clear monitoring regime, alternate explanations must be explored. Intuitively the results can be explained by lack of stress from peer pressures of repayment leading to reduced dependence on intoxicants. The paper contributes to the literature by providing novel evidence of reduced consumption of intoxicants with access to credit in a non-monitored environment. Major policy implications coming out of this study is that it may not always be necessary to have a strict regiment for monitoring of loan usage and repayments as it may be counterproductive. It may be far more efficient to have a more liberal credit program with simple norms for eligibility which will not only relax credit constraints but also lower stress levels of borrowers. Given the agricultural credit angle of the program under study, such policies may eventually be beneficial in lowering farmer suicides resulting from stress of repayments. JEL Classifications: O12; D12 Keywords: temptation goods; consumption; agricultural credit reform; Kisan credit cards Contact Author's Email Address: somdeep@iiml.ac.in, INTRODUCTION Credit market institutions are often considered to be commitment devices for individuals to get around the problem of time-inconsistency and self-control, allowing the poor to commit themselves to a [...]

This paper aims to evaluate the impact of Rotating Savings and Credit Associations (RoSCA) on household assets in Indonesia. RoSCA is locally known as arisan in Indonesia and has been around for many centuries as a special form of micro-savings institution that is informal and community based. However, there has not yet been adequate academic research on the economic implications of arisan participation, especially in terms of household wealth and welfare. That is what this paper intends to investigate. We use the Indonesian Family Life Survey (IFLS) data collected in 2000, 2007 and 2014, covering around 83 percent of Indonesia's population. The data in particular provides longitudinal data of various household assets, along with demographic data of household heads including their arisan participation status. We divide the survey participants into two groups based on arisan participation from each period. Then we use the Difference in Difference (DiD) method in multiplicative form with robustness standard errors to evaluate the changes in household assets over time, using results from arisan participation between 2000 and 2007, and then 2000 and 2014, in two models. The estimated results show that participation in arisan has a significant positive impact over time on total household assets, including house and land assets and vehicles in both models with mixed impacts on other categories of assets such as appliances, furniture, poultries and jewellery. The impact on household savings is unsurprisingly negative alongside the asset accumulation. Interestingly, demographic variables such as gender, age and education of the household heads appear to have positive impacts on total household assets while the household's location, i.e. urban or rural, has no significant impact. The results have several implications. The quantum of arisan funds received by the members could often be used for the purchase of household assets, e.g. land, houses and vehicles. The association could also regulate the households' saving behaviour through peer monitoring. Furthermore, it would also enhance social capital and entrepreneurial activities across the community, which could be utilized by various development programs that are run by the government. JEL Classifications: D71, O16, O17 Keywords RoSCA, Arisan, Micro-saving, Household assets Corresponding Author's Email Address: egc_asif@ntu.edu.sg, INTRODUCTION Many people around the world, especially in low-income countries, do not have access to formal financial intermediaries. In this void, the mobilization of savings in response to consumption and [...]

This objective of this paper is to analyze the impact of human capital on economic growth in North African countries usinga threshold model applied to panel data over the 1985/2017 period. The results revealed the significant impact of the human capital threshold on economic growth, which reflects higher levels of financial development and high trade openness. For a long time, the economic growth in the North African countries has been based mainly based on traditional economic growth factors. On the other hand, the impact of school enrollment is also significant, which implies the existence of a nonlinear relationship. In fact, school enrollment was shown to play an indirect role by increasing the impact of financial development, foreign direct investment and trade openness on economic growth, which showed that higher levels of financial development creates new business opportunities and increases the performance and efficiency of their financial sectors by ameliorating their overall economic performance .To fill this research gap, the present paper showed that the trade openness is positively correlated with economic growth, which implies the importance of globalization and trade liberalization in the valuation of economic growth. The paper finds that the high level of human capital is considered as incentive for domestic companies to easily understand the technical configurations of the technologies adopted by foreign companies .These findings are expected to help policymakers to increase the literacy rate in these countries through the improvement of the educational system to ensure economic growth , it is necessary to orient the economic policies to encourage the accumulation of human capital and improve financial intermediation .Furthermore, our results indicated that the role of education is very important for the economic activity, innovation, social and even political changes and democratic transitions. JEL Classifications: J24, D63, O50, O55 Keywords: Human capital, economic growth, Panel Threshold Model, North African Countries Contact Author's Email Address:saoussenouhibi@yahoo.fr, INTRODUCTION The North African countries are vulnerable to both the impact of the 2008 world financial crisis and the 2011 Arab spring movement. These economic shocks had a significant impact [...]

The objective of this paper is to analyze the nature of inequalities among the municipalities of Chihuahua State, Mexico and the factors that contribute to the disparity. The state of Chihuahua has a deep household inequality due to the nature of the inhabitants' occupations and comprises a significant percentage of the people living in poverty in Mexico because of social deprivation and low income. Previous studies on inequality in Mexico show that significant differences among the municipalities is caused by factors such as marginalization, low economic activity, and informal activities while some other studies have used similar variables selected from social and economic sphere. All these works used these variables to obtain the socioeconomic development index for each region under study. Following the methodology used in de Haro et al. (2017), this paper examines the social and economic conditions of the 67 municipalities of Chihuahua State by calculating the Socioeconomic Development Index (SEDI) of each municipality using the data compiled on variables such as marginalization, degree of urbanization, gross economic activity rate, economic dependence coefficient and density of paved roads. The result shows that two municipalities: Juarez and Chihuahua City have the most favorable socioeconomic conditions due to a high urban density and a low marginalization. On the other hand, Batopillas, Carichi, El Tule, Balleza, Dr. Belisario Dominguez, Chinipas, Rosario, Uruachi, Morelos, San Francisco de Borja, Urique, Nonoava and Temosachi have the most unfavorable conditions due to high marginalization and high economic dependence coefficient. The policy implications of the study are stated in the conclusion which recommends that the Mexican government must concentrate efforts on education through incentives that will encourage schooling in order to increase the pool of human capital in deprived municipalities. Likewise, creating considerate fiscal policies for poorer regions-all for the purpose of attracting businesses that can create employment. Lastly, the government should work on providing enough amenities, infrastructures and better town planning. JEL Classifications: O18, R10, R58. Keywords: Regional Development, Uneven Development, Poverty, Economic Policy. Corresponding Author's Email Address: larynz2002@yahoo.com, INTRODUCTION The State of Chihuahua is one of the 32 federal entities of Mexico. It is located in North-western Mexico and is bordered by the states of Sonora to the [...]

The literature on the finance-growth nexus predominantly suggests that finance affects growth through capital accumulation in developing countries. The existing literature has also produced conflicting findings on the impact of finance on economic growth. This paper suggests that the infusion of financial technology into Africa can propel the continent to distribute credit into productive sectors that can induce per capita income convergence between the continent and the United State of America, the world's technological leader. The paper also examines whether shocks in the growth of financial resources are responsible for economic growth in Africa. In the first instance, the paper employed contemporaneous cross-sectional analysis using the robust least square tool to ascertain the long-run per capita income convergence between Africa and the United States if financial resources are channeled into productivity growth. In the second instance, a dynamic generalized method of moment tool was employed to implement both symmetry and asymmetry impact of finance on the growth of Africa. The paper's objectives are analyzed based on country-level data obtained from the World Bank, PennWorld Table 9.0, and the Heritage Foundation. The paper also explores the impact of sub-regional economic integration by analyzing the role of the various economic groupings in Africa in channeling financial resources into growth. The contemporaneous analyses suggest that the level of financial development can propel African countries to converge to the per capita income level of the United States of America in the long run provided other growth fundamentals such as human capital, trade openness, and telecommunication infrastructure are present. 13 African countries, given their level of financial development and other policy measures are likely to converge to the per capita income of the USA. In the dynamic analysis, we find that lower growth in financial systems development is detrimental to economic growth. However, the growth in financial development in the various economic groupings in the continent produces divergent responses on economic growth. Whereas financial innovation in COMESA and ECCAS induces economic growth, that of ECOWAS and ARABMAG is detrimental to economic growth. The evidence makes a strong case for measures to promote productivity-oriented financial intermediation in Africa. The African Union should liaise with the financial institutions to encourage them to channel more financial resources to support innovation in the private sector to boost industrialization and therefore aid in the realization of sustainable development. The partnership with the financial sector should be tailored-made to suit the special needs of the various sub-regions of the continent. Anthony Adu-Asare Idun University of Cape Coast, Ghana JEL Classifications: 01, 02, 03, 04, 05. Keywords: Africa, Convergence, Innovation, Financial development, Economic growth Corresponding Author's Email Address: aidun@ucc.edu.gh, INTRODUCTION The world has embraced the tenets of globalization to the extent that physical barriers do not impede the transfer of technology from technological innovators to laggards. Similarly, models exist [...]

The globalization of the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic impacts is set to run havoc across economies in the world, throwing many into recession and possibly depression. The aim of this paper is to provide an overall understanding of the likely macroeconomic shocks of the pandemic on a diverse range of economic activities and indicators across economies. The paper covers implications to demand, supply, supply chain, trade, investment, price level, exchange rates, and financial stability and risk, growth, and international cooperation. The paper combines a unique theoretical impact mapping and supplements it with emerging evidence to develop the impacts' likely progression and span. Furthermore, the paper uses a standard Aggregate Demand and Aggregate Supply (AD-AS) model of macroeconomics to explain the likely growth effects arising out of essential and non-essential goods markets and outlines necessary features policy responses should consider. Data and information to analyze the impacts are assimilated from different sources, including news and media publications, the OECD, and IHS Markit-CIPS. Assessments of this paper suggest that many economies are about to see a period of stagflation driven by demand and supply slump, increased unemployment, deflationary pressure, reduced trade flows, and disruptions in the supply chain, which may result in a recessionary period if not acted fast with innovative policy responses. As almost all economies are badly affected, a global growth recession is imminent if the pandemic continues. However, based on past experience of pandemics and epidemics and the current evidence, a U-shaped recovery pattern is the most optimistic possibility for most countries and the world economy. The paper could help policy-makers in understanding the pandemic's broad-based impacts and policy needs to fight the imminent economic damage. Particularly, assessments with respect to the essential and non-essential goods markets could provide useful insights in designing appropriate policy responses to fight the pandemic. All considered, the paper calls for a collective and globalized response alongside standalone policy responses undertaken by individual economies. The assessments are broadly in line with the limited literature available on macroeconomic implications of CVODI-19 and could serve as a basis for advanced analysis on COVID-19 economics. JEL Classifications: F40, I15, E1, E6 Keywords: COVID-19, coronavirus, coronanomics, pandemic, economic impacts Corresponding Author's Email Address: sbarua@du.ac.bd, INTRODUCTION The outbreak of the novel coronavirus, termed as COVID-19 (also known as SARS-CoV-2) by the World Health Organization (WHO), is declared a pandemic by the WHO. The rapid 'globalization' [...]

Historically, women's contributions to the economic, political, and social well-being of a society have been dramatically devalued. It is only in the last fifty years that the thinking towards the role of women has shifted. Today, there is general global consensus that female empowerment is 'smart economics' and that gender equality has a positive effect on economic growth and human development. The inverse relationship, that economic growth has a positive effect on advancing gender equality is more controversial and understudied. To gain a broader picture of the role of women in economic development, as well as a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between economic growth and gender equality, this paper situates women within the human development paradigm and first explores the notion of economic empowerment. A discussion of the importance of women's empowerment to economic development follows. With this framework laid, the context of economic development and gender equity in East Africa is explored, followed by two specific case studies of Ethiopia and Uganda. This paper draws several conclusions about the role of women in the economic development trajectories of Ethiopia and Uganda, namely that discrimination and marginalization of women in Ethiopia and Uganda has limited both women's roles economic development and impeded their human development. In the Ethiopian and Ugandan economies, women do not participate in high growth sectors and a majority of women, if employed, work in the agriculture sector with substantially unequal access and control over productive resources. In both nations, girls are expected to attend less school than boys, resulting in lower literacy compared with their male counterparts. In health, life expectancy has improved substantially in both Ethiopia and Uganda and girls have a higher life expectancy than boys at birth. Despite said advances, fertility rates remain astronomically high in both Ethiopia and Uganda, which curbs (sustained) economic growth potential and women's empowerment. This evidence suggests that if Ethiopia and Uganda significantly increase economic and educational opportunities for women, while maintaining gains in healthcare, fertility rates will decrease and more sustained economic growth can occur, which will ultimately have positive gains for women's empowerment and for development. JEL Classifications: D6, J16, N17, O1, Keywords: Economic Development, Women's Issues, Gender Equality, Ethiopia, Uganda Corresponding Author's Email Address: kulkarnk@msudenver.edu, INTRODUCTION Globally, women make up 49.6% of the population, and in East Africa this percentage is slightly higher (50.3%, on average). As at least half of the world's population, the [...]

This paper studies recent inflation dynamics in Egypt with the objective of assessing whether structural factors are behind the trend rise in inflation since 2003. Using an autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model, we uncover the role of two significant determinants of long-run inflation dynamics: excessive monetary growth, and a rise in the intensity of relative price variability. These two variables are shown to play a key role in explaining inflation developments over the period January 2000 to October 2018 after controlling for the impact of exchange rate devaluations, energy price liberalization, adverse supply-side shocks and movements in international commodity prices. While the latter group of variables was influential in triggering inflation waves over the short to medium term, our empirical results show that excessive monetary growth and increased variability in relative prices are the main drivers behind the trend rise in inflation. The paper also estimates an unrestricted vector autoregressive (VAR) model to further study the direction of causality between inflation and relative price variability. Results from the forecast error variance decomposition show that relative price variability accounts for the largest proportion of the variance decomposition for inflation, further confirming its central role in driving inflation dynamics. In addition, the impulse response functions also indicate the strong response of inflation to positive RPV shocks, while inflation appears to have an insignificant effect on RPV. Furthermore, our ARDL model demonstrates superior predictive ability when its out-of-sample forecast performance is compared with benchmark models. The policy implications of our findings point to the immediate need to curb excess money growth in the economy, and also the pertinence of treating the issue of price liberalization using a holistic long-run plan as opposed to the historically-adopted piecemeal approach. JEL Classifications: C22, E31, E58 Keywords: Inflation, Structural Determinants, Relative Price Variability, Excessive Monetary Growth, Autoregressive Distributed Lag Model Contact author's email address: diaa.noureldin@aucegypt.edu, INTRODUCTION One premise that is not subject to much controversy in economics is that low and stable inflation is a desirable economic outcome. There is a growing consensus that low [...]

The woollen textile industry in India is an industry in the MSME sector with a few key players but having huge export potential mainly attributed to the abundance of availability of raw material. India is one of the leading producers of wool and woolen products in the world and it is estimated to be the seventh-largest producer of wool in the world. The present paper uses yearly and monthly data of exports of woollen products from India from 2008-2018 collected from UN-COMTRADE to forecast exports from 2016-2022. The paper based on Revealed Comparative Advantage and Export Intensity Index narrows down on top 9 countries where India has a potential for increasing its exports.An attempt has been made to identify the markets using ARIMA Model to forecast the future destinations for woolen exporters. Before applying ARIMA, it is necessary to check the stationarity of the series being forecasted. The paper indicates that the thrust countries of India's exports of woollen textiles are Australia, Bahrain, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, South Africa, Senegal and United Arab Emirates. It is found that projected woollen textile exports from 2018-2022 are constant in case of Australia, Bahrain, Brazil and Senegal but rising at an increasing rate for Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka, South Africa and United Arab Emirates. Thus, this indicates that India needs to gain more competitive advantage to diversify and grow in the identified markets for export and further to enter new markets of various other countries and increase its level of exports in the future. For enhancing exports of woollen textiles from India, it is suggested that, policy makers as well as exporters of Woollen products from India need to work in sync to achieve the objective of export promotion to the identified thrust markets. Favourable terms should be negotiated to meet the non-tariff barriers in the identified export destinations. Initiatives need to be taken to reduce the cost of production, increase manufacturing capacity and integrate the fragmented supply chain. Keywords: India's Woollen Textiles, Export Forecasting, Revealed Comparative Advantage, Export Intensity, ARIMA JEL Classification: F14, F17, O13, O53 Corresponding Author's Email Address: areej@iift.edu, INTRODUCTION India is one of the leading producers of wool and woolen products in the world and it is estimated to be the seventh-largest producer of wool in the world. [...]

In the aftermath of the 2008-2009 global financial crisis, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision set new regulatory requirements, tagged Basel III, aimed at preventing banking instability during periods of economic strain. One of the Basel III requirements is Net Stable Funding Ratio (NSFR), defined as the amount of available stable funding as a percentage of the amount of required stable funding. To meet the requirement, banks must have available stable funding that is greater than or equal to the amount of the required stable funding. The basic idea behind the Basel III NSFR requirement is that banks with sufficient stable and long-term funding can more effectively maintain their intermediation capacity amid external negative financial and economic shocks. However, the possible bank performance effects of this requirement have become a cause for concern since its inception in 2010. Against this backdrop, the aim of this paper is to use empirical means to explore the potential impacts of this requirement on bank risk-taking behaviour. Using a sample that consists of 376 commercial banks in 38 African countries over the 2005-2015 period, the paper examines the possible effect of the Basel III Net Stable Funding Ratio requirement on three bank risk measures. These measures include the ratio of loan loss provisions to total assets, the ratio of non-performing loans to total loans and Z-score. In static and dynamic panel frameworks, the results reveal that NSFR is negatively associated with the ratio of loan loss provisions to total assets and the ratio of non-performing loans to total loans and positively related to Z-score, indicating that NSFR reduces bank risk. In other words, the results suggest that when stable funding increases, the banks' risk-taking behaviour reduces and their financial stability increases. The results are robust to a battery of estimation techniques, including quasi-maximum likelihood estimation technique, two-step system generalized method of moment, fixed effects, etc. The findings of this study highlight that banks' liquidity management has implications for their loan portfolio risk. The findings also suggest that the Basel NSFR requirement can be implemented to reduce bank risk-taking behaviour in Africa. JEL Classifications: G01, G21, G28 Keywords: Africa, bank risk, Basel III NSFR Corresponding Author's Email Address: mastersunny4study@yahoo.com, INTRODUCTION The failure of the Basel II Accord to prevent the 2008/9 financial turmoil prompted its review by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS). The outcome is the introduction [...]

This paper examines the drivers of overall inflation and its component, food inflation in India using monthly data from April 1996 to March 2017. The analysis covers both WPI and CPI-IW measures of inflation along with their component food inflation. The study uses cointegration approach to identify the determinants of inflation in India. Empirical estimates of the study show that there is a long-run relationship between inflation and its determinants that include expected inflation, output gap, rate of growth of money supply, exchange rate, interest rate, fiscal deficit, minimum support prices, rainfall international oil and food prices. These determinants also Granger cause both the measures of inflation. The normalised generalised variance decompositions suggest that determinants of inflation, in descending order of importance include expected inflation, exchange rate, rate of growth of money supply and output gap and least variation in them is explained by interest rates. This analysis is found to be similar for both the measures of inflation. Thus demand factors such as exchange rate, rate of growth in money supply and output gap explain significant variation in both the measures. On the supply side global factors like international oil and food prices play a key role in determining both overall and food inflation in the economy. This has important policy implications in the light of new monetary framework where flexible inflation targeting is adopted by the central bank. Inflation management will become a more challenging task as inflation is also significantly determined by the supply side variables. The Reserve Bank of India's report of the Expert Committee to Revise and Strengthen the Monetary Policy Framework (ECRSMPF) reports that monetary policy has little or no effect on food and fuel inflation, which are the supply side factors. The report also finds that high inflation in food and fuel with strong secondary effects gets generalised in the system through inflation expectations. Shocks to food and fuel inflation have a high degree of persistence on household inflation expectations which leads to more prolonged effects on headline inflation. Hence, for better management of inflation dynamics, an analysis of the driving factors can help predict likely changes in inflation more efficiently and accurately. JEL Classifications: E31, E64, Q18 Keywords: NKPC, Demand and Supply side factors, Overall and Food Inflation, Wholesale and Consumer Price Inflation, Vector Error Correction Model (VECM), Granger causality, Forecast Error Variance Decomposition Corresponding Author's Email Address: deepika_goel@hotmail.com, INTRODUCTION The primary objective of this paper is to identify the long-run determinants of overall inflation and its component, food inflation, for the Indian economy by using monthly time-series for [...]

The transmission mechanisms of monetary policy through the exchange-rate channel become operative when any change in the policy interest rate under inflation targeting leads to a change in the real interest rate. This change in the real interest rate, in turn, changes the real exchange rate, which affects the trade and capital flows and hence real output. Although such a linkage between the interest rate and trade-capital flows is well-developed in advanced economies, it remains debatable whether the suggested monetary policy transmissions mechanism involving the interest and exchange rates operates in emerging market economies, such as Thailand. This paper uses quarterly data for Thailand over the period 2000Q2-2017Q4 to investigate the extent to which the interest rate is effective in affecting the real exchange rate and trade flows under the present inflation targeting strategy of monetary policy in this country. The paper specifies and estimates a structural vector autoregression (SVAR) model with six endogenous variables, namely real output, prices, interest rate, real exchange rate, real exports and real imports, in the presence of two external variables, namely the world oil price and the US federal funds rate. The empirical results suggest that the change in the policy interest rate that the central bank of Thailand (Bank of Thailand) deploys as the instrument of monetary policy for price stability under flexible inflation targeting does not make significant contributions to the forecast error-variances of other endogenous variables in the system. These findings raise doubt about the effectiveness of the interest rate in influencing the real exchange rate and through it, trade flows, real output and the prices. However, as suggested in the extant literature on open-economy macroeconomics, both real output growth and inflation maintain feedback relations with changes in the real exchange rate, real exports and real imports. JEL classifications: C32, C51, E52 Keywords: Interest rates, real exchange rate, trade flows, SVAR model, Thailand Corresponding Author's Email Address: akhtar.hossain@newcastle.edu.au., INTRODUCTION Monetary policy has gained increasing importance in many emerging market economies since the East Asian financial crisis of 1997-1998. As the epicenter of the financial crisis, Thailand has attracted [...]

Food security becomes an issue for concern and possible policy response when it points to nutritional deficiencies and access to insufficient food in many developing countries. Over the years, the prime focus has been on self-sufficiency in major cereal production and energy availability for food security in these areas. Diversification in farm production could play a part in improving household nutritional well-being through enhancing economic access to food and increasing the opportunity to consume own production. The aim of this paper is to bridge the research gap by providing quantitative evidence on the impact of farm diversity on household food security, highlighting the nutritional dimension in Bangladesh where rice is considered the major cereal item. In doing this, the authors compare farm households that are very specialized in rice cultivation with more diversified farm households using two different measures of dietary diversity. In addition, two other measures of farm diversification-Simpson's Index of Diversity along with a crop-livestock count variable-have been used in the analysis. The empirical results presented here are based on cross-sectional data collected through a multistage random sampling of 260 farm households in central, northern, and southwestern regions of Bangladesh. This paper used Household Model as the theoretical framework and ordered probit model for the econometric analysis. The results confirm that farm diversification has a positive and significant influence on food diversity and it therefore improves household food security. Diversification through shifting out of cereal cultivation particularly rice production is found to be an effective and noteworthy approach to enhance food diversity in Bangladesh. In addition, household food diversity is influenced by higher education level, better market access, household size, production per capita, non-farm income diversification, and land size. This paper specifies that agricultural diversification can be a useful approach to improve household food diversification. The study suggests that investment in education and development of infrastructure for better market access will help to boost dietary diversity in Bangladesh. The key policy implication is that farm diversity needs to be encouraged as an important strategy to increase consumption of a varied diet and enhance household food security. JEL Classification: O13, Q12 Keywords: Food security, farm diversification, dietary diversity, Bangladesh, INTRODUCTION Food security has been at the focus of development policies and academic interest for many decades. Approximately one out of every nine people in the world are undernourished, 98% [...]

This paper investigates how stock market volatility of Ten (10) developed and Seven (7) emerging economies were affected by the institutional quality and macroeconomic factors using data from 2001 to 2012. Applying the standard historical volatility model adopted by Jones et al. (1998) and Andersen and Bollerslev (1998) we find that stock market of the sample countries was volatile during the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and these effects were statistically significant for the sample emerging countries as well as developed country groups. There is evidence that the sample emerging stock markets exhibited higher stock return volatility than developed stock markets during the observation period. We also find that stock return time-series variables were not stationary over the study period at 1 per cent difference. The study uses the fixed-effects approach to determine the institutional quality and macroeconomic factors that impacted higher stock market volatility for the sample emerging and developed country group. Aligned with institutional theory, we also document that several institutional quality country-level governance indicators and macroeconomic variables are statistically correlated with the stock market volatility during the observation period. For example, we find evidence that some institutional quality and macroeconomic indicators such as rule of law, and credit information have a significantly negative effect on stock market volatility, while other macroeconomic variables such as carbon dioxide (Co2) emission, tax revenue, and board money have a significant positive association with stock market volatility. These findings suggest that our sample markets were volatile not only because of the other macroeconomic factors but also for institutional quality factors. The robustness test also produces similar results with little variation. The findings of this investigation have several policy implications. First, there is evidence that stock markets of the developed and emerging countries were volatile during the GFC and the rule of law appears to be the dominant factor in deterring the stock market volatility. Further, several macroeconomic and fiscal factors, including Co2 emission, tax revenue and board money may seem to be a potential barrier for international investment and portfolio diversification. Therefore, an international investor needs to be careful on portfolio diversification while investing in a poorly structured economy. JEL Classifications: G14, G15 Keywords: Volatility, GFC, Governance indicators. Contact Author's Email Address: skhandaker@swin.edu.au, INTRODUCTION This paper focuses on the volatility of stock market returns in developed and emerging markets. In particular, it examines the effect of institutional quality with key country-level governance indicators [...]

This paper investigates the effect of tax harmonization on foreign direct investment (FDI) in the Southern African Development Community (SADC). Previous attempts aimed at addressing relatively unsatisfactory FDI flows into the region have been largely unsuccessful, compounded by the existence of varied tax rates, laws and tax policies amongst SADC countries. The study employs dynamic panel estimation techniques to test the underlying economic specifications. Specifically, the feasible generalized least squares and the difference GMM approaches are used to test the causal link between FDI and taxation. These approaches are complemented by the Extreme-Bound Analysis (EBA) approach to perform a robustness test and sensitivity analysis over the period 1990-2010. The EBA technique helps to identify robust measures of economic policy changes from the taxation and FDI model. The paper modifies relevant data, per Sudsawasd and Mongsawad (2011), for SADC countries, expanding the number of years from 1995-2006 to 1990-2010, with more relevant and available data. Findings of a first attempt to investigate the linkage between taxation (tax rates and policy) and FDI, using an eclectic panel data modeling approach are presented. A new value added tax harmonization variable is introduced (in addition to a corporate income tax harmonization variable) via a tax policy harmonization measure in the panel empirical investigation, complemented by a sensitivity analysis (using the EBA analysis technique) on the causal relationship between taxation and FDI inflows. The main finding from the study indicates a positive and significant relationship between tax harmonization and FDI. The causal relationship is more robust when errors in the regressors (for instance contemporaneous correlation, heteroskedasticity, cross-sectional dependence, country-specific challenges, endogeneity) are controlled for. From a policy perspective, the paper provides empirical evidence to support the argument for the effective use of taxation towards stimulating regional FDI inflows. Policy considerations towards improved tax harmonization emanating from the paper include the need for individual SADC governments to promote national tax policies aimed at supporting regional tax harmonization objectives towards enhanced FDI, through strengthening existing tax agreements and treaties (such as the SADC 2002 Memorandum of Understanding on Taxation and the 2006 SADC Finance and Investment Protocol). JEL Classifications: [E.sub.60], [F.sub.15], [F.sub.21], [H.sub.25], [H.sub.27] Keywords: SADC, FDI and Tax Policy Harmonization, Panel Data, Cross-sectional Dependence, Endogeneity, Sensitivity Analysis, INTRODUCTION Multinational enterprises consider a number of factors before making decisions on whether or not to invest in Africa, and specifically in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) (1). Some [...]