From Short-Term Risk to Long-Term Strategic Challenges: Reviewing the Consequences of Geopolitics and COVID-19 on Economic Performanceâ€
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report (Previous Reviewer 1)
I have reread the revised manuscript, the Author added method and statistical results of the data used for reviewing. I still have several concerns.
1. Could you add at least one conclusion for the analysis form Sec. 4.1 to Sec. 4.5? These sections take 6 pages, is there any implications for these analysis? For example, who Who is more concerned about the impact of the epidemic, who is more concerned about the Russia-Ukraine war?
2. What aspects of impact do these studies focus on? If you could use word frequency analysis based on the abstracts you selected papers, you could have some new findings.
Author Response
Thank you
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report (Previous Reviewer 3)
Topic
The topic is current and may be of interest to the reader.
Introduction
What was the gap identified in the literature that justifies the study?
What is the contribution of the study to the existing literature, namely to strategic challenges?
If there is a new, recent context, such as the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, is a bibliometric approach justified? Why is this so?
Literature Review
The literature review section is insufficient. It is smaller than the introduction.
Methodology
It could be structured by subheadings in order to help the reader.
Results
The results are presented and discussed, in line with the topic studied.
Conclusions
The contribution to the literature and the contribution to practitioners could be highlighted.
Highlight in a subtitle the limitations and suggestions for future research.
Author Response
Thank you
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report (New Reviewer)
The author picks definitely the hottest topics of our days, such as the Russia-Ukraine crises and the prolonged effects of the COVID-19 outbreak on the economic development. The range of issues the author attempts to cover is, however, rather wide. This makes the paper too broad and poorly concentrated on investigating the root causes of real relationships between economic development parameters and the effects of the pandemic or the geopolitical tensions. To my mind, the author should have defined the clearly identified set of parameters (one array for economic development, another for COVID-19 effects) and test the correlations between them. The same approach could be applied to testing the correlations between the economic development variables and the parameters the author may identify for the Russia-Ukraine war. The latter would be a noticable contribution to the literature, since the links between military conflicts and economic development patterns remain underinvestigated. Instead, the author uses a rather general discussion of possible relationships between the broad and hardly identified set of parameters for a hardly identified set of stakeholders or countries. The review of the literature is hardly an effective tool since the arrays may include extremely diverse papers on economics, politics, military issues, logistics, and any other issues. Therefore, I strongly recommend the author to reconsider the methodological approach to this study and focus on investigating the relationships between particular variables instead of discussing potential links.
Author Response
Thank You
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report (Previous Reviewer 1)
There is only one subsection in Sec. 6, the subsection title could be deleted.
Author Response
Thank you, and corrected
Reviewer 3 Report (New Reviewer)
The author has substantially revised the early version of the manuscript. Unfortunately, I must say that my concerns about the author's approach to establishing the data arrays and analysing them have not been addressed properly. The author says that "the study is not to see the relationship but it is to see the impact". I hate to say that, but this makes no sense to me. The impact is a relationship, one factor (variable) affects the other. Also, the author says that the study uses no independent and dependent variables, which is impossible if one aims to reveal a relationship (or an impact). To my mind, the paper remains poorly concentrated on investigating the root causes of real relationships between economic development parameters and the effects of the pandemic or the geopolitical tension. The data analysis component is poor, and the author's approach to collecting and analyzing data is doubtful.
Author Response
Thank you
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
This study investigates the economic performance of major world economies during covid-19 and geopolitical crisis (2019-2022) based on the regional data extracted from IMF database. The methods used were trend analysis of economic variable and related implications. The Author aims at investigating the impact of covid-19 and geopolitical crisis on economic performance of regions across the world, and attempts to investigate the short-term risks and long-term strategic challenges of the crisis. The topic is interesting, while it lacks of in-depth analysis.
Major comments:
1. The Author used some economic indicators to show their change trends in the Results, how covid-19 and geopolitical crisis affect economic performance? It lacks of causality analysis or in-depth analysis on their characteristics for different economic entities.
2. It is difficult to see the relationship between economic impact and the short-term risks and long-term strategic challenges of the crisis.
3. Did the Author could give some forecast for future economic growth for main economic entities, this forecast would be useful for decision-making.
Other comments:
Fig.1, unit in the y-axis should be labelled, is it a percentage change? Did it consider the inflation?
Page 3, the Author stated that “The year of 2020 was the worst economic performance for all countries across the world; the world economic growth estimated by negative 3 percent”, who give this estimation? and also here “the world economy was registered a growth of 6.1 percent [16]. The majority of developed and developing countries recovered during this year”, in which year?
Figure titles in most figures were lost, e.g., Figure 3, Figure 4 and Figure 5.
Author Response
Thank you very much for your kind comments.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
The topic is interesting and fresh. It clearly explains the purpose of the study. However, I have several questions about the current manuscript. I list my concerns in the following.
In the introduction
The novelty of the paper should be addressed. What is the contribution of the study compared to the literature? The reviewed literature related to this topic should be provided in order to show the difference between this study and the literature and confirm the novelty of this study compared to the literature.
In the Materials and Methods
The authors use a quantitative research approach through trend analysis. I don’t think this method is good enough to explain the political and COVID-19 impacts. Why not the authors use econometrics models to explain their impacts? It is well known that trend analysis may not reveal significant findings, and there are no statistical tests to support your evidence. Also, I do not quite understand how the authors collect the data for 2022. I do not know this the data for 2022 is available. If the forecasted data for 2022 is used, how do we justify it?
In the discussion part
It seems that the authors only review the responses of many financial variables during the COVID-19 and Russia-Ukraine wars. How does this link to your material and methodology in section 3?
Reading the document generally extends the feeling that the authors are trying to compare various variables and just review the situation of financial indicators during the COVID-19 and Russia-Ukraine war. What is new in this work? Research should be developed so that you can provide novel results and an interpretation that will lead the good implication for the authorities.
Author Response
Thank you very much for the comments
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
Topic
The theme generates no new interest for the reader.
Introduction
A question is formulated as the driving force for conducting the study, but the focus of the article is not clear to the reader. Various topics and contexts are mentioned, which are important. But what is their contribution to the development of the study?
What is the gap identified in the literature that justifies conducting the study?
Literature Review
There is no literature review section.
Methodology
The reader needs more information about the context in which the study was conducted. Data collection and method.
This section does not provide assurance that the study can be replicated by other researchers.
Results
Section 3 should not be called "Results and Discussions".
The results previously follow from the identification of the gap in the literature, the literature review supporting the conduct of the research, and the justification of the methodology used to accomplish the objectives of the study. However, this sequence is not guaranteed in the previous sections.
Discussion of the results
This section is good, but there needs to be an interconnection with the previous sections.
Conclusions
The conclusions are in line with the results.
Author Response
Thank you very much for the comments
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 4 Report
Congratulations, just proofread your manuscript once again.
Author Response
Thank you very much for your comments
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
I think the Authors have improved the paper a lot.
Author Response
Thank you
Reviewer 2 Report
The only concern I have toward this paper is the reliability of the trend analysis, as their criticism and comment are based on the authors' view alone. The authors should at least report other papers working with similar topics to confirm that this trend analysis is still reliable and discuss the benefit deriving from this kind of analysis in this context. Also, it is better to show or cite some literature that found similar results presented in this study.
Finally, although the time series data is limited, cross-sectional data is available. Why not the authors consider cross-sectional or panel data to analyze this topic? I believe there is a large room to improve the analysis part of this work and gain a more reliable discussion of the results.
Author Response
Thank you
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 3
Reviewer 2 Report
The manuscript has been improved, but my major concern is still the quantitative analysis. The authors explain that
"we didn’t use the econometric analysis as the study didn’t determine any dependent and independent variables. we didn’t have enough measurable quantitative data for the geopolitical crises. The issue of geopolitical analysis is taken to account after Russia Ukraine war, which counted for less than a year, whereas other economic variables and covid-19 issues are used for 4 years."
I am not quite agree, the reasons are follows
First, The topic of this study is "Untold Story of Geopolitics and Covid-19 Impact on Economic Performance". Thus, this study has Untold Story of Geopolitics and Covid-19 as the independent variables, while Economic Performance is dependent.
Second, we didn’t have enough measurable quantitative data for the geopolitical crises. The issue of geopolitical analysis is taken to account after Russia Ukraine war, which counted for less than a year, whereas other economic variables and covid-19 issues are used for 4 years.
This is not quite true, you may use other indicator of the UKraine-Russsian WAR, such as Wikipedia Trends search data in country i on quarter t, this measures the intensity (or anxiety) of internet searches related to the current armed conflict between Russia and Ukraine (reported in Tables with “Ukraine–Russia​ war”) (Boungou, & Yatié, 2022).
The dummy variable analysis is another way, the the authors may consider.
The research article must comply with scientific research process, otherwise this is just the report for communicating the opinion of the author without any scientific support.
Why not the authors submit this manuscript as the communication or Case report (see, https://www.mdpi.com/about/article_types) ? This might be the appropriate channel for this manuscript.
Fang, Y., & Shao, Z. (2022). The Russia-Ukraine Conflict and Volatility Risk of Commodity Markets. Finance Research Letters, 103264.
Boungou, W., & Yatié, A. (2022). The impact of the Ukraine–Russia war on world stock market returns. Economics Letters, 215, 110516.
Author Response
Thank you
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
