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The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the digital transformation of businesses. Using a unique global panel dataset, this paper documents the patterns of digital adoption during the pandemic across firms in 57 (mostly developing) countries. The data show the tale of two stories. On one hand, the pandemic drove firms to increase the use of digital platforms and invest in digital solutions. On the other hand, the digital divide increased across several dimensions. There remain substantial gaps between small and large firms as well as across sectors, particularly for new investments in digital solutions. Firms that did not use any digital platform or channel before the pandemic, also lagged in their response to the pandemic, increasing the gap with those that were more digitally ready. Moreover, although the share of online sales across firms for all size groups increased, there is a growing concentration of online sales among top firms. The paper analyzes some of the factors associated with this increase in the digital divide and discusses the policy implications addressing the widening digital divide and leveraging the benefits of rapid digitalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article considers a method of controlling the motion of the output links of the tracking system of pneumatic actuators of technological equipment actuators. Dynamic and qualitative characteristics are improved by means of proportional-integral-differential (PID) controller. The mathematical model of actuator system, which includes power and control parts, has been developed. By calculation experiment the dynamic characteristics of the actuator have been obtained, from which it has been found possible to reduce the energy consumed by the actuator system to about 30%.

The article is devoted to the development and analysis of methods of identifying dynamic objects. A neural network with the architecture of SSD MobileNetV2 has been developed to solve the problem of detecting baggage tags and barcodes. Several approaches are considered to solve the problem of identifying digital-letter information: Tesseract, SSD InceptionV2, OpenCV and a convolutional neural network. The efficiency of the methods on real images was checked. It was concluded that electricity consumption can be reduced by 49.43%.

The need for the development of fast and efficient software requires the automation during the build, test and release stages. Thus, a methodology of the continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) emerges which using a continuous integration server which makes easier automatical build, test, and package of the new feature settings. Poor understanding and execution of CI/CD operations can slow down and even stop the pace of a software project. Many bottlenecks in the CI/CD pipeline can arise from misconfiguration, in other words, an inadequate level of automation, inappropriate agent characteristics, and a suboptimal queuing strategy. On the other hand, the finding a way to analyze and improve the settings of the CI/CD pipeline brings great management and economic benefits, since an optimal configuration ultimately implies high efficiency. In this regard, this study attempts to develop a simulation model that will provide a testing environment for a variety of factors that affect CI/ CD performance. The present study, therefore, aims to provide a pipeline simulation model based on the logic of a queuing system, which is based on a multi-agent approach and an experimental environment that allows you to test different settings and scenarios.

Relying on a novel dataset covering more than 120,000 firms in 60 countries, this paper contributes to the debate about policies to support businesses through the COVID-19 pandemic. While governments around the world have implemented a wide range of policy support measures, evidence on the reach of these policies, the alignment of measures with firm needs, and their targeting and effectiveness remains scarce. This paper provides the most comprehensive assessment to date of these issues, focusing primarily on developing economies. It shows that policy reach has been limited, especially for more vulnerable firms and countries, and identifies mismatches between policies provided and policies most sought. It also provides some indicative evidence regarding mistargeting of policies and their effectiveness in addressing liquidity constraints and preventing layoffs. This assessment provides some early guidance to policymakers on tailoring their COVID-19 business support packages and points to new directions in data and research efforts needed to guide policy responses to the current pandemic and future crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The global financial crisis and its aftermath triggered extraordinary policy responses in advanced countries. Their impacts—from asset price bubbles to currency depreciations—have often been felt in the developing world, and the same can be expected from their undoing. India's experience around the Fed's 'taper talk' announcement of 2013 offers insights which could be relevant for other countries as quantitative easing programmes wind down and monetary policy is 'normalized'. This paper estimates the contribution of external and domestic factors to long‐run trends and short‐term fluctuations in the value of the Indian rupee around the 2013 depreciation episode using a rich dynamic model that controls for a large number of exchange‐rate determinants. The paper finds that a global surprise factor, more than domestic vulnerabilities, was the main driver of the large rupee depreciation in the summer of 2013. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article estimates the impact of informality on profits using a new survey administered to 1,200 firms with less than 50 employees in four cities in Ecuador. The article proposes a novel definition of informality which explicitly recognises that most firms comply with some regulations but not others. Accounting for firm selection and controlling for a large set of firm, owner and location characteristics, the article finds that more formal firms tend to be more profitable and have higher output per worker. This impact operates, inter alia, through improved access to credit and higher sales through issuance of tax receipts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Can poverty decline with little growth in real GDP? This paper examines the case of Jamaica, where the poverty headcount halved between 2003 and 2007 despite real per capita GDP growth of just 1.1 percent per year, by analyzing the factors contributing to the observed reduction in poverty using household and labor force surveys. It sets out by providing a sectoral, demographic, and spatial picture of the evolution of poverty and finds that poverty reduction has been broad based, benefitting both rural and urban areas. Nearly three quarters of the poverty reduction is attributed to growth in average household consumption, which outpaced GDP growth due to large remittance inflows, and one quarter to narrowing inequality. In turn, around half of the reduction of inequality is explained by narrowing returns to education and declining sectoral wage gaps. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper assesses the potential impacts of the removal of agriculture trade distortions using a newly developed data set and methodological approach for evaluating the global poverty and inequality effects of policy reforms. It finds that liberalisation of agriculture and food could increase global extreme poverty by 0.2 per cent and lower moderate poverty by 0.3 per cent. Beneath these small aggregate changes, most countries witness a substantial reduction in poverty, while South Asia - where half of the world's poor reside - experiences an increase in extreme poverty incidence owing to high rates of protection afforded to unskilled-intensive agricultural sectors. The distributional changes are likely to be mild but exhibit a strong regional pattern. Inequality is likely to fall in regions such as Latin America, which are characterised by high initial inequality, and rise in regions like South Asia, characterised by low initial inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]