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Conditionalites, measures that a borrowing country should adopt to obtain loans from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), are pervasive in IMF programs. This paper estimates the effects of political and economic factors on the number of conditions and on the size of fiscal adjustment requested in an agreement. As found in the literature, political proximity of the borrowing country to the Fund’s major shareholders has an important effect on the number of conditions. However, the magnitude of fiscal adjustment requested by the IMF is strongly affected by the size of a country’s fiscal deficit but not by political proximity. We also find a very small correlation between the number of conditions and the requested fiscal adjustment.

Using data from the seventh round of the Afrobarometer, we find that a greater regional incidence of corruption in the utilities sector is associated with a reduced likelihood that a household reports that it has access to enough clean water. This result is not evident in older rounds of the survey that were conducted prior to methodological improvements made in round seven. Moreover, this association holds only in areas with a piped water system. Thus, our findings are consistent with the argument that corruption is a barrier to accessing water through its impact on the quality of water services. While a household that has paid a bribe is more likely to have a water access point, the regional incidence of utilities corruption predicts that the household will not have enough clean water. Individual acts of bribery, while associated with connection to a water network, are not associated with greater access in reality.

Since December 2019, the COVID‐19 epidemic has been spreading continuously in China and many countries in the world, causing widespread concern among the whole society. To cope with the epidemic disaster, most provinces and cities in China have adopted prevention and control measures such as home isolation, blocking transportation, and extending the Spring Festival holiday, which has caused a serious impact on China's output of various sectors, international trade, and labor employment, ultimately generating great losses to the Chinese economic system in 2020. But how big is the loss? How can we assess this for a country? At present, there are few analyses based on quantitative models to answer these important questions. In the following, we describe a quantitative‐based approach of assessing the potential impact of the COVID‐19 epidemic on the economic system and the sectors taking China as the base case. The proposed approach can provide timely data and quantitative tools to support the complex decision‐making process that government agencies (and the private sector) need to manage to respond to this tragic epidemic and maintain stable economic development. Based on the available data, this article proposes a hypothetical scenario and then adopts the Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model to calculate the comprehensive economic losses of the epidemic from the aspects of the direct shock on the output of seriously affected sectors, international trade, and labor force. The empirical results show that assuming a GDP growth rate of 4–8% in the absence of COVID‐19, GDP growth in 2020 would be ‐8.77 to ‐12.77% after the COVID‐19. Companies and activities associated with transportation and service sectors are among the most impacted, and companies and supply chains related to the manufacturing subsector lead the economic losses. Finally, according to the calculation results, the corresponding countermeasures and suggestions are put forward: disaster recovery for key sectors such as the labor force, transportation sector, and service sectors should be enhanced; disaster emergency rescue work in highly sensitive sectors should be carried out; in the long run, precise measures to strengthen the refined management of disaster risk with big data resources and means should be taken.

In this paper, we investigate the relationship between various economic policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic (liquidity support, prudential policies, borrower support, asset purchase, and policy rate decisions) and the growth of nonperforming loans (NPLs) in 2020 across 47 economies. Controlling for other relevant determinants of NPLs, our regression analyses show that economies in which policymakers have used prudential and borrower support measures reported significantly slower growth of aggregate NPLs. The prudential measures also confirmed a more robust relationship with NPL reductions compared with borrower support measures. Added to this, non-mortgage consumer loans are found to be more sensitive than mortgage loans to economic policy responses.

This paper analyses political business cycles in ten former European communist countries. The dataset used covers the period 1990-2018. The results show that the political business cycle (PBCs) manifests itself in these countries through both fiscal and monetary policy. Changes in government expenditure during election times are found to be significant in reducing unemployment. Hence, it signals there is a politically driven fiscal expansion. The results also show the importance of institutional quality in reducing the effects of the PBCs. The monetary policy models indicate that changes in money stock during and around election times affects the unemployment rate. Undertaking a sub-sample analysis of the non-EU and EU members highlights the case that membership of the EU is an important factor in preventing the development of PBCs.

This paper focuses on economic policy uncertainty spillovers across Europe, before and after the outburst of the Eurozone crisis, using data for seven Eurozone countries for the period 2003–2019. At first, we analyze the spillovers of uncertainty in Europe via the estimation of the Diebold‐Yilmaz spillover index. The results indicate that uncertainty connectedness was 50.5% before the crisis, while it dropped to 30.6% afterwards indicating a sharp drop in uncertainty spillovers across the seven Eurozone countries. We also find that the importance of domestic causes in national uncertainty has increased during the crisis at the expense of imported factors. Dynamic net spillovers reveal that core Eurozone countries are uncertainty exporters before the crisis, while periphery countries transmit uncertainty to other countries during the crisis. An examination of the country which suffered the most during the crisis, using impulse response analysis, reveals that the Greek macroeconomic indicators (stock market, GDP, unemployment, and the Economic Sentiment Index) were affected more by domestic, rather than European uncertainty. The highest responses are indicated during the crisis. Overall, there is positive interdependence between Greek and European uncertainty, which diminishes during the crisis.

Great Britain established the new colony of South Australia (SA) in 1834, and migration from Britain to the colony began in 1836. After seven turbulent years, the discovery of two large deposits of copper at Kapunda (1843–4) and Burra (1844–5) renewed the colony’s economic prospects. Over the 1845–50 period, SA supplied roughly 9 per cent of the world’s copper production. Immigration to SA from Britain soared, with the colony’s population more than tripling between 1844 and 1851. We use the Beine–Coulombe–Vermeulen model of an economy with a booming resource sector to frame our empirical investigation of the boom’s effects on the export of other traded goods and worker living standards. Using newly developed SA wage and price series for this period, we find that immigration mitigated and offset some Dutch disease effects: there were just modest increases in SA living standards, increases in the export of wool and wheat, and a larger share in production for non‐traded goods. Finally, we conclude that the decision by Governor Grey to force broad ownership of the ‘monster’ Burra mine and the use of revenues from land sales to subsidise immigration helped SA avoid the corruption and rent‐seeking associated with other resource booms.

China's emergency management (EM) system has undergone a series of reforms and organizational changes since the SARS epidemic in 2003. However, institutional segmentation, unbalanced power for the Emergency Management Office, pervasive internal corruption, and state monopoly control are threats to the administration's goal of resilient and modern EM systems. The new round of 2018 reforms was intended to promote integration through the establishment of the Ministry of Emergency Management and related institutional restructuring involving power redistribution. The reforms are nevertheless likely to face some potential problems like the operation of a superâ€

This article attempts to provide an exploratory review of policy reforms, trends, and determinants of fiscal deficits in Uganda, a low‐income country that has undertaken many successful economic reforms. Fiscal policy reforms initially sought to stabilize the economy in the post‐crisis period with structural adjustment and economic recovery programs. With the restoration of macroeconomic stability, fiscal objectives shifted to poverty eradication following the promulgation of the Poverty Eradication Action Plan. More recently, a key fiscal policy objective is to unlock key growth and competitiveness constraints with the rolling out of National Development Plans. These reforms achieved much success in the early years, especially in the areas of macroeconomic stabilization and growth because they received support and political goodwill from the highest echelons of government. However, fiscal slippages during more recent years have often threatened to reverse the hard‐earned gains from these reform programs. Consequently, fiscal outcomes have been characterized by revenue shortfalls, budget execution challenges, accumulation of arrears, and rising debt.

Every year the UK government spends billions of pounds purchasing goods,works and services that are vital to growth, development, health and social welfare. Performed well, public procurement helps...

The COVID‐19 pandemic is significantly disrupting human capital in labour markets. Workforce reductions cause firm outputs to fall and prices to rise, leading to unprecedented economic costs. To quantify the economic costs, we develop a dynamic general equilibrium macroeconomic model that incorporates susceptible–infectious–recovered epidemiology dynamics, where individuals can be healthy, infected or recovered so that evolution of human capital can be well tracked. We characterise optimal public policy responses to the decline in human capital by either isolating susceptible residents from infected residents to reduce the spread of disease or increases in government spending to improve the recovery and death rates.

This paper asks why it took 10 years since a major famine in Indonesia in 1957 for Australia’s food aid to increase in greater amounts, and why food aid was so significant In Australia’s foreign aid to Indonesia during the late 1960s and 1970s. Indonesia’s reluctance to apply for food aid under the Colombo Plan is the reason for the delay. A combination of humanitarian, commercial and international relations interests converged to shape Australia’s rapidly growing food aid to Indonesia after 1966. Food aid contributed to alleviating food shortages and famines in Indonesia. It also supported Australian firms in regaining their share in the growing market for wheat-based products in Indonesia, and in building market share for Australian rice exports, in competition with US producers and the US PL480 food aid program. Food aid also allowed Australia to expand its foreign aid program to Indonesia rapidly after 1966, in support of the government of new President Soeharto and improved bilateral relations.

We study the forecasting power of economic uncertainty about government policy for future bond returns. Using the economic policy uncertainty measure (EPU) developed by Baker, Bloom, and Davis (2016), we investigate its relationship to expected bond returns. The impact of the EPU is shown to be large for earlier maturities at shorter investment horizons. Estimating an affine term structure model incorporating the EPU, we show that term premia estimates from this model with this additional pricing factor exhibit higher fluctuations and move closely with the variations in observed yields. The implied term premia show strong countercyclical movements, hence better explaining higher risk compensation under adverse economic conditions as expected by theory.

This paper explores the effects of global economic policy uncertainty (GEPU) on conditional volatility in the gold futures market using Markov regime‐switching GARCH‐MIDAS models. The in‐sample empirical results suggest that GEPU indeed contains predictive information for the gold futures market, and higher GEPU leads to higher volatility within the gold futures market. Moreover, the novel model, which adds Markov regime switching with time‐varying transition probabilities and the GEPU index, achieves relatively better performance than those of the other competing models from a statistical point of view. Furthermore, we discuss the asymmetric effects of different changes in GEPU on the gold futures market and the models' performances with different horizons, and we find that our new model has better predictive performance under negative changes in GEPU than under positive changes in GEPU. Further discussion also confirms that our previous findings are robust during two special cases, the global financial crisis and European debt crisis, during which the market suffered from fierce fluctuations and was fraught with considerable uncertainty.

High levels of economic policy uncertainty in various parts of the world revamped the de- bate about its impact on economic activity. With increasingly stronger economic, fi nancial, and political ties among countries, economic agents have more reasons to be vigilant of for- eign economic policy. Employing heterogeneous panel structural vector autoregressions, this paper tests for spillovers from economic policy uncertainty on other countries' economic ac- tivity. Furthermore, using local projections, the paper zooms in on shocks originating in the United States, Europe, and China. Our results suggest that economic policy uncertainty re- duces growth in real output, private consumption, and private investment, and that spillovers from abroad account for about two-thirds of the negative effect. Moreover, uncertainty in the United States, Europe, and China reduces economic activity in the rest of the world, with the effects being mostly felt in Europe and the Western Hemisphere.

This paper provides an overview of the initial crisis responses to the coronavirus pandemic and asks whether and how both the nature of the COVID-19 crisis and the national responses to this differ from those witnessed during the Great Recession. We argue that the speed and scale of the crisis are indeed distinctive, but that claims of symmetry — a crisis affecting all equally — are misplaced. We suggest that stimulus packages have, in broad terms, reflected the scale of the threat and that the wage subsidies and employment supports that were introduced or adjusted are novel in scope and scale, with innovative developments. There has been a greater emphasis on housing than was apparent in responses to the Great Recession and, while a focus on taxation in response packages has been a focus in both crises, its form differs, with a greater reliance on deferrals rather than tax reductions in the stimulus plans announced to date. Our account stresses the agility of crisis responses and this agility must be regarded as welcome, mitigating a great deal of social harm during the initial phase of the pandemic. Whether these short-run responses create pressures for wider-ranging change is much debated, but highly uncertain.

Renewable energy has long been central to SNP policy making and Scottish independence. During the 2014 referendum, green electricity generation was presented as a means for Scotland to achieve ‘reindustrialisation’. Despite a world‐leading transition in electricity supply, the Scottish government has struggled to develop renewables manufacturing. Scotland’s largest offshore engineering company, BiFab, entered administration in 2020. This article explains the faltering of Scotland’s green industrial revolution. First, it assesses renewables’ privileged place in SNP perspectives, underlining its deep roots in North Sea oil and criticisms of British governments’ mismanagement of offshore opportunities. Second, the failure of market‐led policy making to provide the anticipated industrial benefits from offshore wind developments is explained through the domineering role of foreign state‐owned enterprises and global supply chains in the UK’s renewables sector. The conclusion argues that older nationalist perspectives offer remedies, but these require a more active industrial policy that diverges from the current approach of the Scottish Government.

In the last decade or more, the European Union has faced a number of challenges, such as the divergence of per capita income after the global financial crisis and the ensuing great recession of 2007-9, the sovereign debt crisis of 2010-12, banking failures, and the creation of an incomplete banking union, a long period of a "near-debt deflation," divisive euro-wide reactions to the immigration crisis (2015/6), the challenges to enact proper policies against climate change, the divergent political trends since the great recession of 2007/9, and now the Covid-19 pandemic-driven recession and its long-run economic and health impacts Already before and after the great recession many plans for reforms, institutions, and policies were suggested to overcome and manage those challenges We will focus on plans to reform the fiscal architecture of the EMU, but we will also argue that the chosen institutional arrangements will have a significant impact on a sustainable Social Europe Yet, how a sustainable Social Europe will arise depends also on how the pandemic recession will be managed on a Euro-wide level Some of the aspects discussed here are echoed by political parties having competed with European platforms for the European election Fiscal governance reform, Social Europe, climate concerns, and immigration issues have been essential core parts of most political party platforms We will discuss and evaluate recent proposals, in particular, on fiscal reforms as well as some aspects of new pillars for a Social Europe We will try to assess which of these comes closer to attaining the triple objective of (a) helping to dampen cyclical divergence, (b) providing fiscal and social buffers, and (c) avoiding national self-interests and promoting joint European goals Designing a proper monetary, fiscal and social policy may provide the opportunity for a sustainable EU recovery from the current pandemic-driven downturn Yet the challenges and road blocks are still numerous

We investigate the impact of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) exposure on the earnings management behaviour of Chinese firms. We find a significantly positive relation between EPU exposure and firms’ earnings management. In addition, the EPU exposure effect is more pronounced for firms with weaker external monitoring mechanisms. We also find that the financial leverage and growth rate of individual stocks have significant predictive ability for EPU exposure. When we examine the potential mechanisms linking EPU exposure to earnings management, we find that financial distress is the dominant mechanism for firms with high leverage, while it is cash flow volatility for the high‐growth firms.

How responsive are democratic governments to business demands for tax cuts? We research this question in comparative case studies of cuts in corporate taxes and inheritance taxes in Austria and Sweden. We find that governments, regardless of partisan composition, are responsive to business demands, but that fiscal and electoral goals attenuate responsiveness. In both countries, the limited revenues generated by inheritance taxation and greater alignment of business demands with middle-class voter interests resulted in governments heading business demands for an abolition of this tax. Goal conflict were larger for corporate tax cuts. In both countries, governments tried to minimize these goal conflict by adopting compensatory policy measures, specifically measures to broaden the tax base and simultaneous tax cuts for low-income groups. The findings suggest that the policy output of business-friendly tax cuts reflect a balancing of conflicting goals, rather than outright business dominance.

This paper analyzes the impact of adopting the ISO 14001 standard on firm environmental and economic performance. In particular, it is argued that the degree of environmental awareness of the society (EAS) and firm size are two factors moderating the effect of ISO 14001 on firm performance. A number of hypotheses are formulated and empirically tested on an international sample of 583 listed companies in 46 countries over the period of 2009–2018. The findings show that (i) ISO 14001 adoption contributes to reducing firm carbon emission intensity and increasing firm profitability; (ii) the impact of ISO14001 on profitability is greater for companies from countries with high EAS and for larger firms; and (iii) the impact of ISO 14001 on carbon intensity is greater for headquartered in countries with low EAS. Managerial and policy implications resulting from the widespread adoption of certifiable environmental standards are also discussed. Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (Spain) and the European Regional Development Fund, Grant/Award Numbers: ECO2017‐86054‐C3‐2‐R, ECO2017‐86305‐C4‐4‐R (AEI/FEDER, EU).

The events that occurred after the worldwide diffusion of COVID‐19 provide a real‐life example of how uncertainty can severely affect the global economy. This paper reviews literature on the negative impacts of the economic policy uncertainty index (EPU) as developed by Baker et al., The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2016, 131, 1593–1636 on individuals, businesses, governments, and economies at the local and international levels. This reveals that a high EPU is associated with adverse effects on households, corporations, and governments, which tend to delay many financial decisions under high uncertainty, which leads to lower consumption, fewer issuances of debt, fewer investments, and higher unemployment. The effects of political and regulatory uncertainty also extend to the commodity markets, such as the adverse effects on both oil and gasoline markets, and can potentially create adverse impacts on the crypto‐currency market and its potential growth. We demonstrate that governmental uncertainty also affects financial, housing, and equity markets; debt issuances; and the entire economy. This underscores the importance of considering EPU as a risk factor. The association with several components of the global economy reflects not only the EPU index's critical influence, but also the importance of risk management. Our results lead us to consider the gravity of economic policy uncertainty and call for innovation across different sectors to mitigate its adverse effects.

In a world of competing flag States and short-term employment, enjoying the benefits provided by a social security system is a difficult, if not impossible, task for many seafarers. The Maritime Labour Convention, 2006, has abandoned the flag State principle in favour of the residence principle for that reason. This article addresses the implementation challenges of this approach by examining the European Union case, and highlights the advantages of the residence principle in terms of administrative efficiency and effectiveness, enhanced coordination between social security contributions and personal income tax in cross-border situations, and better use of State aid measures.