Economies — Open Access Journal

We apply a relatively novel leading–lagging (LL) method to four leading and one lagging indexes for industrial production (IP) in Germany. We obtain three sets of results. First, we show that the sentiment-based ifo index performs best in predicting the general changes in IP (−0.596, range −1.0 to 1.0, −1.0 being best). The ZEW index is very close (−0.583). In third place comes, somewhat unexpectedly, the behavioral-based unemployment index (−0.564), and last comes order flow, OF (−0.186). Second, we applied the LL method to predefined recession and recovery time windows. The recessions were best predicted (−0.70), the recoveries worst (−0.32), and the overall prediction was intermediate (−0.48). Third, the method identifies time windows automatically, even for short time windows, where the leading indexes fail. All indexes scored low during time windows around 1997 and 2005. Both periods correspond to anomalous periods in the German economy. The 1997 period coincides with “the great moderation” in the US at the end of a minor depression in Germany. Around 2005, oil prices increased from $10 to $60 a barrel. There were few orders, and monetary supply was low. Our policy implications suggest that the ZEW index performs best (including recessions and recoveries), but unemployment and monetary supply should probably be given more weight in sentiment forecasting. Full article

The challenge of food security in Nigeria hinges on several factors of which poor technical efficiency is key. Using a stochastic frontier framework, we estimated the technical efficiency of agricultural households in Nigeria and tested for the significance of mean technical efficiency of food-secure and food-insecure agricultural households. We further assessed the determinants of agricultural households’ inefficiencies within the stochastic frontier model and adopted a standard probit model to assess the determinants of households’ food security status. The results of our analyses revealed that; on the overall, the agricultural households had a mean technical efficiency of 52%, suggesting that agricultural households have the tendency of improving their technical efficiency by 48% using the available resource more efficiently. We found that households that are food-secure are more technically efficient than food in-secure households and this was significant at one-percent. Our results provide useful insights into the role of land size and number of assets as determinants of agricultural households’ food security and technical efficiency status. Full article

The predictions that emerge from tournament theory have been tested in a number of sports-related settings. Since sporting events involving individuals (golf, tennis, running, auto racing) feature rank order tournaments with relatively large payoffs and easily observable outcomes, sports is a natural setting for such tests. In this paper, we test the predictions of tournament theory using a unique race-level data set from NASCAR. Most previous tests of tournament theory using NASCAR data used either season level data or race level data from a few seasons. Our empirical work uses race and driver level NASCAR data for 1114 races over the period 1975–2009. Our results support the predictions of tournament theory: the larger the spread in prizes paid in the race, measured by the standard deviation or interquartile range of prizes paid, the higher the average speed in the race. Our results account for the length of the track, number of entrants, number of caution flags, and unobservable year- and week-level heterogeneity. Full article

The increase in the geographical mobility of labour as a result of poverty, unemployment and unstable economic conditions, among other factors, especially among professionals, has been associated with a brain drain in Nigeria. Despite the high level of migration and subsequent remittances from migrants, a large proportion of Nigerians still live in poverty. The increased participation of women in migration in the country also brings to the fore the existence of gender-specific migration experiences and how this has in turn affected their households. Based on gender, this study assesses the extent of labour mobility, its determinants and how it influences remittance inflows and household poverty using the logit regression model Propensity Score Matching and Linear Regression with Endogenous Treatment Effect Approach. Results reveal that while more males travelled for employment purposes, more females travelled due to marriage arrangements. More of the migrants that were working after migration had worked before migration and had the highest average amount of remittance sent to households. The study shows that labour mobility increases the amount of remittance sent to households. However, the increase was higher among male migrants than female migrants. More than half of the migrants had poor households; meanwhile, labour mobility was found to reduce the extent of poverty. The study recommended that policies that improve the welfare of labour and reduce the brain drain, unemployment and closures of enterprises in the country should be put in place. Also, effective policies and interventions that promote the use of remittances to achieve maximum reductions in poverty should be pursued. Full article

We research the response of the proportion of student borrowers with ninety or more days of delinquency or in default to variables such as unemployment and the average debt per borrower after the financial crisis of 2007–2008, in the United States, using panel data of 50 states from 2008 to 2015. The proportion of borrowers with delinquency or default was modelled as a function of unemployment, the average debt per borrower, consumer sentiment, and financial stress, using a logit and probit binomial model. The specification tests support that no relevant variable was omitted. Unemployment and the average debt per borrower are statistically significant and contribute to increasing delinquency or default in the 50 states of the panel sample. The results also reveal a differential impact of unemployment among the four regions considered by the US Census Bureau. Full article

Electronic/electrical waste (e-waste) has now become a global concern due to its negative impact on the environment and health. This negative effect of e-waste is increasing with the advancement in the electronics industry, especially in Pakistan, which is the leading e-waste disposal destination. Therefore, this study aims to find consumer choice behavior regarding green electronics in Pakistan. For this purpose, a multidimensional modified green perceived model (functional value quality, functional value price, social value identity, social value responsibility, emotional value, and conditional value) is used. Cross-sectional data is collected from 237 consumers through a self-administrative questionnaire. The results of variance-based structural equation modeling (SEM) (partial least squares (PLS)-SEM) suggested that functional value price, quality, social value identity, responsibility, emotional value, and conditional value positively and significantly influence the consumer choice behavior regarding green electronics. the possible reasons for the findings and the implications for managers and policymakers are discussed. Limitations of the study and future research directions are also suggested. Full article

The European Central Bank (ECB) engaged in an expanded asset purchase programme (APP) from 2014 to 2018 to help achieve their primary objective of price stability. Total assets purchased over this period was over €2.5 trillion and new net purchases ended in December 2018. This paper identifies whether the ECB’s APP in Ireland operated through the portfolio rebalancing channel, the signalling channel or the lending channel. It presents a quantitative descriptive analysis of some key Irish data sets in the 2014–2018 period and uses time-series visualisation and trend analysis to identify trends and correlations. There are a number of preliminary findings. First, much downward pressure on sovereign debt yields and spreads had occurred before the APP began due to previous accommodative monetary policy and the signalling channel. Second, the corporate-sector purchase programme (CSPP) did impact on targeted bonds and may have had spill overs to non-targeted bonds. Third, the APP did not lead to much increased lending to the SME sector. Fourth, while households did engage in traditional portfolio rebalancing, Irish banks did not and were perhaps more motivated to meet their capital requirements and manage their level of reserves. This is a first step towards understanding the transmission channels of ECB policy in Ireland and more work needs to be done to detangle the transmission of the most recent APP from other factors and consider these findings in the context of theoretical models. Such work is important to help inform policy makers on enhancing the transmission mechanism to the Irish economy of the recently launched new ECB asset purchase programme from November 2019. Full article

Considering the goals of Modern Monetary Theorists, this article examines inflation stabilization and employment maximization through a Taylor Rule for fiscal policy, similar to John Taylor’s foundational examination of the behavior of the Federal Reserve. If it is the role of the federal government to aid in the maintenance of the dual mandate of the Federal Reserve, then their behavior should follow a similar policy of setting an intermediate target of deficits relative to the maximum employment (the “Federal Job Guarantee”) and the inflation target. The paper will compare the historical data with the rule. When the predictions of the Deficit Rule are compared to historical data from 1965, we find that fiscal policy aligns with what the Deficit Rule predicts with two exceptions: the stagflation of the 1970s and the current increases in budget deficits. Full article

This article examines the determinants of household income among urban and rural areas in India and evaluates households’ performance with different characteristics in terms of poverty. It uses four rounds of data from the consumer expenditure survey (50th, 1993/1994; 55th, 1999/2000; 61st, 2004/2005; and 66th, 2009/2010) by the National Sample Survey Organization (NSSO) in the empirical section. This study consists of two main parts. In the first, it looks at the impact of the characteristics of the head of the household (age, educational level, marital status, and gender) and household characteristics (main occupational type, household size, and social status) on monthly per capita expenditure through conditional mean least squares (LS) regressions and conditional quantile regressions. Households headed by those who are older, married, belonging to lower castes, and living in less-developed states are more likely to be in poverty. In the second part, the article explores stochastic dominance rankings relative to large classes of welfare functions/preferences between pairwise sub-groups identified by the survey year, gender, social status, and occupational type of the household heads. Our results show that ‘inferior groups’ such as ‘Backward classes’, agricultural labor in rural areas, and casual labor in urban areas are vulnerable and may be targeted for poverty alleviation strategies. The first part sheds light on key determinants of household expenditure, while the second provides a picture of poverty outcomes which helps identify potential target groups for poverty-alleviation strategies. Full article

The external financing of fiscal deficit is key to bridging public revenue shortfalls within developing economies. However, the public expenditure responses to the incoming foreign financial assistances, as documented in the existing literature, depict ambiguity with respect to the nature of the assistances. Against this milieu, this paper attempts to perform a comprehensive analysis of the dynamics adhering to the foreign financial inflows–government expenditure nexus in Bangladesh tapping annual data from 1985 to 2017. The vector error-correction model approach to short and long-run correlations and causality analyses, variance decomposition technique, and impulse response function exercises comprise the econometric methodologies considered in this paper. In a nutshell, the results from the analyses indicate toward foreign financial inflows crowding out public investments, and reducing the tax and non-tax efforts of the government, while diminishing the amount of local public borrowings in Bangladesh. Conversely, financial assistances in the form of concessional loans and those originating from multilateral sources are found to enhance government expenditure, while the foreign aids intended for the health sector are found to be fungible in nature. Thus, these contrasting findings are expected to generate crucial policy implications with regard to structuring appropriate public policies. Full article

Incentives are provided to attract multinational enterprises (MNEs) to host countries, with the expectation that their technology will spread to domestic firms. The purpose of this study is to examine how domestic firms benefit from the spillover of technology from MNEs. Using balanced panel data obtained from the World Bank Enterprise Survey, this study examined the impact of technology spillover through three channels: demonstration, competition, and worker mobility on productivity of domestic firms in Indonesia and Philippines. This study also explored the importance of domestic firms’ absorptive capacity in capturing benefits from the three spillover channels. The Cobb–Douglas production model was used as the basis for the estimation model. A fixed-effect model for panel data analysis was used to analyze the data. The empirical outcome of this study revealed that worker mobility is the most viable channel of spillover in the two countries. It also showed that firms with high absorptive capacity were found to benefit from all the channels of spillover in both countries, while the firms with low absorptive capacity benefit differently in the two countries. Thus, this study validates the need for domestic firms to develop absorptive capacity in order to benefit from the technology spillover from MNEs. Full article

This study contributes to research on the nonparametric evaluation of German trade forecasts. To this end, I compute random classification and regression forests to analyze the optimality of annual German export and import growth forecasts from 1970 to 2017. A forecast is considered as optimal if a set of predictors, which models the information set of a forecaster at the time of forecast formation, has no explanatory power for the corresponding (sign of the) forecast error. I analyze trade forecasts of four major German economic research institutes, a collaboration of German economic research institutes, and one international forecaster. For trade forecasts with a horizon of half-a-year, I cannot reject forecast optimality for all but one forecaster. In the case of a forecast horizon of one year, forecast optimality is rejected in more cases if the underlying loss function is assumed to be quadratic. Allowing for a flexible loss function results in more favorable assessment of forecast optimality. Full article

We find value premium in the Chinese stock market using a conventional buy-and-hold approach which longs the portfolio with the highest BM ratio and shorts the one with the lowest BM ratio. Based on the finding, we test a new strategy by combining the value premium effect and technical analysis. During the sample period (1995 to 2015), we trade the objective portfolio or risk-free asset according to the moving average timing signals, and we find excess return from such a zero-cost trading strategy. We perform various robustness tests and find that the excess returns remain significantly positive after adjusting for risks (on three factor models) and transaction costs. In general, we find that the combined trading strategy can generate significant positive risk-adjusted returns after the transaction costs. Full article

The well-known subprime mortgage crisis, which began to manifest in early 2007, since when the effects of the speculative bubble begin to become evident from the increase in default rates in residential mortgages, has triggered a global crisis that has pushed various legislations over time to implement a series of financial reforms with the specific objective of avoiding that similar phenomena could be repeated over time. The ability to repay a loan is strongly influenced by the amortization algorithm that the bank has decided to adopt. This appears even more evident in variable interest rate loans since, as the economic conditions of the indexation parameter change, the definition of the loan balance and the related portion of interest will be decisive in relation to the borrower’s ability to repay the loaned capital. A study of the main amortization algorithms and the related descriptions in the bank contracts will allow us to show which are the main issues due to an information asymmetry that, unfortunately, characterizes this type of contract and would seem to be one of the main reasons that lie at the root of the aforementioned crisis of subprime mortgages in the USA. Moreover, the authors will provide a clear analysis of the financial indicators usually reported in loan contracts and how often these indications are insufficient to characterize the actual cost of the loan. Furthermore, by highlighting the discretionary choice that banks often obtain following the contractual loan schemes commonly offered to retail and corporate clients, we will show how this often translates into greater cost to the borrower. Finally, we will propose two possible solutions to the problems highlighted, thus allowing us to reduce this information gap, which unfortunately translates into greater costs for customers with the associated increase in default rates, or the so-called nonperforming loan (NPLs) contracts. Therefore, the objective of this contribution is to show which are the most critical aspects of the bank contracts related to contractual transparency and to the presence or otherwise of hidden costs, i.e., not expressly shown in the contract. Specifically, we refer to the loan contracts issued in Italy both with reference to the local banking legislation and to the European one to which Italy must often refer. Full article

This study emphasizes the utility and concerns of China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) on various sectors of Pakistan’s economy through the lens of real stakeholders. Specifically, this study focuses on three aspects: the beneficiary of CPEC; CPEC’s effects on employment, GDP, foreign direct investment and personal income in Pakistan; and the concerns regarding Pakistan’s sovereignty. A qualitative research approach was adopted to explore the objectives of the study. To analyze these aspect, in-depth interviews from different Pakistan’s business community are conducted. Our study finds that CPEC will not only beneficial for both Pakistan and China, but also for other neighbouring countries in the region. To validate these findings, interviewee’s data is analyzed in the light of semantic analysis approach. Our study illustrates that, the development along the corridor will produce employment opportunities that will raise the income level of a common person of Pakistan, and the industrial growth in Pakistan through CPEC will have a positive effect on the country’s GDP. Our study also concludes that CPEC doesn’t pose any threat to Pakistan’s sovereignty. The stakeholders of CPEC are concerned over the intentions of Pakistan government; that need to be clarified. This research study also suggests the maximum benefits out of this mega venture. Full article

Micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs) contribute to the economic development of most developing countries. However, the economic performance of the MSMEs is often restricted by several obstacles. This paper reports on a study of the impacts of public sector corruption on employment growth in MSMEs, as perceived by their managers/owners. The data originated from a nationwide survey that involved MSMEs managers/owners in Papua New Guinea (PNG) that were selected by a stratified random sampling technic. The data was analyzed using a two-stage least squares (2SLS) regression model. The results show that MSME managers/owners perceive that corruption in the public sector is generally linked to an increase in employment growth in their firms. Medium-size enterprises benefit most from corruption in the public sector, whereas small-size firms appear not to benefit. The findings indicate that other than corruption, there might be failures in the public institutions that are hampering the competitiveness, innovations and efficiency in MSMEs. Corrupt practices can precipitate the loss of revenue that would have accrued to the government from tax that could be used to provide facilities required by the public institutions. Corruption in the public institutions of developing countries such as PNG can be tackled by implementing strategies that promote zero-tolerance for corruption. These include promoting public awareness of the cost of corruption to the country’s economy, improvement in the quality of governance, and expanding the capacity of government agencies for effective and efficient service delivery. Increasing the penalty for engaging in corrupt practices could also be considered, while people who engage in practices that discourage corruption should be rewarded. The findings contribute to a potential strategy that could be used to promote ease of doing business in a country by considering the obstacles that MSMEs face. Full article

While some researchers have suggested that the self-employment (SE) sector is a haven during a financial crisis, others believe that SE is not necessarily the desired outcome, but an indicator that the labor market is tightening for some groups. Few researchers have compared the SE sector before and after the occurrence of a significant financial crisis, especially in developed countries. This paper analyzes the determinants of entry into self-employment during the 2008 Spanish Crisis. Using data from the Encuesta de Presupuesto Familiar (EPF), results show that although the rate of SE did not experience a significant change during this time, the crisis affected people differently based on gender, with females being more affected than males. Results also suggest differences between Comunidades Autonomas in how the self-employment sector behaved during the crisis. Full article

The present study employs panel data of 29 provinces and municipalities in mainland China from 2003 to 2016 to empirically investigate the influence of international students on China’s outward FDI. The results show that international students in China can significantly promote outward FDI in various Chinese provinces. Moreover, we observe a substitution effect with export scale and wage level, that is, attracting international students can offset the negative impact of insufficient export scale and low wages on regional OFDI (outward foreign direct investment). From a regional perspective, the growth in international students’ inflows in China has a significant positive impact on OFDI of provinces along “the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road”, but has no significant impact on the provinces along “the Silk Road Economic Belt”. The above conclusions not only elaborate the regional distribution mechanism of OFDI in China, but also provide a reference for each province to formulate more favorable policies to attract foreign talent to effectively implement the strategy of “going global”. Full article

U.S. cities have invested large amounts of sums on public transit and urban rail in the last few decades, but the transit usage in most of these car-oriented cities is very low, and previous efforts to increase ridership have been mostly fruitless. This research examines the factors affecting transit ridership in a large car-oriented metropolitan setting and uses the Dallas region in the United States as a case for the study to identify factors that could help in increasing ridership. Most previous studies of transit ridership have not included many of the variables thought to influence transit ridership. Therefore, the disparities among the findings of empirical research completed to date point to the necessity for further study. This study addresses these shortcomings by exploring multiple factors, measuring population, technology, geography, and socioeconomic characteristics. Full article