Search

Increasing gender equality and enhancing women empowerment through work opportunities are the important steps in achieving sustainable development. The aim of this paper is threefold: (1) to empirically examine the relationship between women economic rights and economic growth for the global sample. (2) To explore whether the effect of women's economic rights is different across different economies. (3) This paper uses spatial econometric techniques to examine the impact of women's economic rights on neighbouring countries. For empirical purpose, we use the data for 171 countries over the period 1960–2016. The results show that women's economic rights positively affect growth; however, the effect is heterogeneous across different economies. From spatial analysis, we confirm that 75% spillover effect of women economic rights is passing through neighbouring country. The results of this study are consistent and coherent with the EU policy about women's economic empowerment where it claims that joint effort in promoting women empowerment by all actors could lead to sustainable development and growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the current society, institutional quality is essential to innovation activity, as formal and informal institutions have a positive impact on innovation. Formal institutional quality establishes the intellectual property rights culture that lowers the transaction costs, required to stimulate the innovation process. Strengthen informal institutions inseminate mutual trust and cooperation, necessary to share the previous knowledge, which is mandatory to invent new ideas. Thus, this study aims to investigate the effect of formal and informal institutions and their indicators on innovation activities. We construct the indices to measure the quality of formal and informal institutions using data on 73 countries for the period 1981–2014. The system GMM estimation technique is used to predict the performance of formal and informal institutions on innovation activities. Besides, this study estimates the effect of each indicator of formal as well as informal institutions on innovations after controlling for FDI, human capital, trade and government size. The hypotheses of positive effects of formal and informal institutional quality is accepted. The size of the effect of different indicators of institutions are varying. The results are robust across developed and developing countries. From a policy perspective, this study suggests that more focused monitoring of institutions is required to improve their quality that ultimately effects innovation activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study has investigated the connection between peace and performance of Pakistan's export sector. The interstates conflicts, terrorist activities and war elements disturb the industry supply chain, damage the means of transportation, and increase the security measures and regulations, which make trade more expensive. On the other hand, encouragement of the peace process lowers military conflicts, promotes diplomatic cooperation, and hence trade among the nations. The purpose of the study is to test whether domestic peace in Pakistan relative to its trading partners promotes its exports. For empirical analysis, we use panel data for Pakistan and its 26 trading partners in export over the period 2007–2018. After controlling the impacts of economic size, market size, infrastructure, and exchange rate, we found that peace in Pakistan relative to its trading partners is important to promote its export sector, which is directly linked with local industries and the wellbeing of individuals. The economic size and market size of the exporting nations relative to Pakistan also positively contributed towards the exports. The depreciation of Pakistan's exporting countries' currencies relative to its currency lowers the volume of exports. Besides, it is also observed that a major portion of Pakistan's exports is routed in a specific region or few countries. Therefore, it is suggested that the government should take active measures to reduce the internal as well as external conflicts, terrorists' attacks, and war elements to promote the volume of exports. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The role of infrastructure in poverty alleviation remains ambiguous due to weak institutions in developing countries. Considering spatial dependence, this study provides empirical evidence on the role of rural infrastructure in poverty alleviation using district-wise data of Pakistan. Results indicate positive direct as well as spatial spillover effects of financial infrastructure and female education infrastructure while positive direct effects of energy infrastructure are observed. The insignificant role of health and transportation infrastructure in poverty alleviation is a matter of serious concern. From a policy point of view, allocation of sufficient financial resources, improvement of female education infrastructure in rural areas and reformulation of health and transportation policies should be priority steps for poverty alleviation. An adverse effect of male education infrastructure on poverty reduction is detected, which needs further exploration. Adverse spillover effects of water and sanitation infrastructure on poverty may suggest the authorities to revise the implementation procedure of National Sanitation and Drinking Water Policy. The analysis might be relevant to the South Asian region due to homogeneous economic development. Moreover, the study provides evidence informing the debate on balanced regional development in developing countries with a particular focus on high and medium level of poverty clusters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the relationship between daily returns of oil and ten European industrial equity indices for the period 2008–2017 using the spatial econometric technique. In our settings, the historical co-movements of sectoral returns are incorporated while modelling the contemporaneous relationships between oil and European sectoral returns. After controlling for regional and global equity risk factors, we find that oil returns pose a significantly positive effect on sectoral indices' returns in line with previous studies. However, the magnitude of economic impact found mostly by earlier studies was largely underestimated without considering the co-movements of sectoral indices. The use of spatial econometric technique allowed us to disaggregate the total impact into a direct (due to oil price) and an indirect (due to spillover effect because of intra-industry co-movements) effect of oil price changes. Our results indicate that the direct economic impact of changes in oil prices on industrial returns is almost 31% more than what has been found by earlier studies. The negative spatial dependence among sectoral indices provides a useful tool to identify the source of the indirect impact of oil on overall equity prices in Europe that in turn explains the overestimation of direct impact by 31%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the relationship between women empowerment and income inequality. In particular, we examine whether empowering women in terms of raising their political, social and economic rights reduce income inequality. Furthermore, this paper also sheds light on the effects of women empowerment on income inequality in different economies characterized by income differences. Using data for 134 countries from 1945 to 2015, we estimate a panel data model with treatment for endogeneity, controlling for savings rate, arable land rate and age-dependency ratio. Our results indicate that women empowerment in all three aspects (social, political and economic) plays an important role in reducing income inequality. This effect is more prominent in lower-middle and upper-middle income countries and is robust to different measures of inequality and women empowerment, and an alternative estimation technique that takes care of endogeneity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study empirically examines the impact of institutional quality, social inclusion and digital inclusion on inclusive growth across different economies characterized by different income groups. Particularly, the study examines the impact of institutions on inclusive growth by using the panel data for 83 countries over the period 2010–2017. For empirical specification, we used two-steps system-GMM estimation technique to tackle endogeneity and min–max normalized indexing technique to construct the indices for inclusive growth, social inclusion, digital inclusion and institutional quality. The results of this study show that there is a direct link between institutional quality and inclusive growth for a higher-income group of countries but not in the rest of the income groups. Contribution of social and digital inclusivity is significant in all three income groups, except for social inclusion in middle-income countries. From the policy point of view, these findings suggest that establishing and strengthening the institutional structure in low- and middle-income countries can contribute towards better and higher inclusive growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the relationship between attitudes toward migrants and social integration. Specifically, we consider two types of migration flow: migration flow from EU countries and migration flow from non-EU countries. The aims of this paper are twofold: (1) we want to understand whether an inclusive attitude towards migrants can contribute to their efforts to integrate with the receiving society (2) we want to understand whether the potential impact is the same across different migrant groups (EU vs. non-EU). Using data from 33 mainly European countries over the period 2003–2016 and controlling for common integration determinants such as inflation, foreign direct investment and educational attainment, our results indicate that there is a significant positive relationship between inclusive and good attitude toward migrants and social integration. We also in the robustness sections, identify that the size of this impact differs across different subcomponents of attitudes and integration, these results are robust to alternative estimation techniques that take cares of endogeneity (System GMM, 2SLS, and Lewbel 2SLS). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to simultaneously investigate whether the active labour market programmes (ALMPs) and the imposition of benefit sanctions help unemployed insured workers in Denmark to find a job sooner than those who do not get any activation. Earlier studies have modelled ALMPs and benefit sanctions separately, which may have resulted in over- or underestimation of the true effect. As part of our empirical methodology, we used a multivariate mixed proportional hazard model and optimally selected the number of support points for the specification of unobserved heterogeneity distribution in our sample. Our results revealed that the impositions of both benefit sanctions and employment subsidies in the private sector have a positive impact on reducing unemployment duration. Some policy implications are drawn. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the relationship between different religious groups and income inequality. In particular, we examine whether different religious groups (Christianity, Islam, Judaism and Buddhism) have an impact on income inequality in a global perspective. Furthermore, this paper also sheds light on the effects of major religious sub-groups (Christianity and Islam) on income inequality. Using data for 130 countries from 1970 to 2013, we estimate a panel data model, controlling for religious beliefs, savings rate, arable land rate and age-dependency ratio. Our results indicate that religion plays an important role in explaining income inequality. In particular, we found that Islam and Judaism reduce income inequality while in general, Christianity and Buddhism increases inequality. However, the effects from sub-groups of Christianity on inequality are mixed; in particular, Anglican and Orthodox significantly reduce inequality while the effect from Catholic and Protestant is opposite. These findings are robust to different measures of inequality and alternative estimation techniques that take care of endogeneity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many structural changes have occurred in the European Union countries, for example, there have been changes in sectoral employment share, in the demand of goods due to technology, in trade patterns and in technology. These structural changes may affect the process of convergence. Most of the existing studies on convergence have ignored the role of structural change, which may have resulted in different conclusion. This study considers the role of structural change in testing labour productivity convergence and its speed at the country, region and industry levels simultaneously. The results show that conditional convergence exists at country, regional and industry levels. However, speed of convergence is different across different aggregation levels. Convergence speed at the regional levels is faster than at the country and industry levels. Furthermore, if we do not incorporate structural change, convergence speed may be over- or underestimated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]