Search Results (2,324)

This study examines the impact of asymmetric oil price fluctuations on inflation in Morocco over the period 1998Q1–2022Q4. Given the country’s dependence on imported energy, it employs the Nonlinear Autoregressive Distributed Lag (NARDL) model to investigate the short- and long-run asymmetric effects of oil price shocks. The results reveal that positive oil price shocks significantly increase inflation in the short run, whereas their effects weaken in the long run. The findings also indicate that oil price increases generate stronger inflationary pressures than oil price decreases. Furthermore, the exchange rate acts as an indirect transmission channel with a limited and lagged effect. These results highlight the importance of strengthening energy resilience and the macroeconomic framework to mitigate inflationary pressure. Full article

This study investigates logistics convergence, financial development, and trade competitiveness in 19 Mediterranean countries over the period 2007–2022. Unlike previous studies that primarily examine average logistics performance across countries, this study contributes by combining convergence-club analysis, logistics inequality decomposition, and second-stage ordered-logit modelling to identify the structural characteristics associated with different logistics regimes across Mediterranean economies. Based on the Logistics Performance Index (LPI), we employ descriptive statistics, sigma-convergence analysis, the Phillips–Sul club convergence approach, relative transition paths, Theil decomposition of logistics inequality, and second-stage ordered-logit estimation. The full-panel Phillips–Sul test rejects the hypothesis of overall convergence, indicating that Mediterranean economies do not converge towards a common logistics-performance equilibrium. However, the club formation procedure identifies three statistically supported logistics convergence clubs, while Libya cannot be assigned to any convergence club. The transition-path analysis reveals three distinct logistics regimes corresponding to upper, middle, and lower convergence groups. The Theil decomposition indicates that the between-club component of logistics inequality becomes increasingly dominant after 2012 and accounts for most logistics inequality during the later years of the sample. Second-stage ordered-logit estimates indicate that GDP per capita, the rule of law, and economic complexity are positively associated with membership in higher logistics convergence clubs, whereas financial development does not emerge as a statistically significant direct predictor. Taken together, the findings suggest that financial development is associated with logistics convergence primarily through broader institutional and structural channels rather than emerging as an independently significant predictor in the ordered-logit analysis. Overall, the findings provide policy implications for promoting balanced logistics development and reducing structural disparities across Mediterranean economies. Full article

This paper examines the macro–micro impact of drought in South Africa using a computable general equilibrium model calibrated to the structure of the South African economy. Drought is represented as a severe supply-side shock: a 50% decline in total factor productivity in agriculture, forestry and fishing. The analysis traces how this shock is transmitted from agricultural production to prices, trade, employment, household income, consumption and welfare. The results show that agricultural output falls by 19.5%, agricultural prices rise by 43.3%, and agricultural imports increase by 84.8% as the economy shifts towards external supply. These sectoral effects generate wider macroeconomic losses, including a 1.0% decline in real GDP, a 1.7% increase in unemployment, a 1.2% fall in household income and a 1.5% reduction in household consumption. Welfare declines for both rural and urban households, but rural households experience larger losses because of their stronger dependence on agriculture, farm income, livestock assets and food markets. The findings show that drought is not only an agricultural or hydrological event; it is an economy-wide and distributional shock transmitted through production, price, trade and labour-market channels. Although imports help to cushion domestic scarcity, they do not fully offset higher prices or welfare losses. Policy responses should therefore combine drought-resilient agricultural investment, water-resource resilience, targeted social protection, food-supply stabilisation and rural livelihood diversification. Full article

The impacts of international tourism on economic performance, sustainable development, natural resources and environmental outcomes have been extensively researched during the last couple of decades in the available body of knowledge. However, the specific role of international tourism on women’s empowerment is rarely researched despite the fact that it creates numerous employment and entrepreneurial opportunities in host economies for women. Accordingly, this research study attempts to examine the impacts of international tourism on women’s empowerment using the framework of Vision 2030 introduced by Saudi Arabia in 2016. Using the ARDL cointegration approach and utilizing annual time series data from 1995 to 2024, this study demonstrates that international tourism has improved women’s empowerment both in the long run as well as in the short run in Saudi Arabia. Besides tourism, this study found that urbanization and female’s labor force participation have accelerated the pace of women’s empowerment both in the long run and short run. In addition, the results underscored that trade openness only matters for women’s empowerment in the long run. Finally, this study demonstrates that internet use is helpful in promoting women’s empowerment in the short run only. The study’s research findings highlight the significance of international tourism as a determinant of women’s empowerment and advocates that the policymakers of Saudi Arabia should introduce gender-inclusive tourism policies. The findings of this research study contribute to the existing body of literature on tourism-led development and gender equality, which is consistent with SDG-5 and Vision 2030 of Saudi Arabia. Full article

This study maps the development of research on AI-driven productivity in Kazakhstan’s economy through a bibliometric analysis of publications indexed in Scopus. The analysis covers the period 2008–2024 and includes 386 articles and review articles. Using Biblioshiny (version 4.1.4) and VOSviewer (version 1.6.20), this study examines annual scientific production, leading countries and institutions, co-authorship networks, keyword co-occurrence, and bibliographic coupling. The results show a steady increase in scholarly attention after 2015, with stronger growth after 2020. The field is organized around five major themes: artificial intelligence and digital economy, machine learning and data analytics, economic growth and efficiency, human capital and digital skills, and Industry 4.0. The findings reveal three structural features that have not previously been systematically documented: the institutional concentration of knowledge production, the fragmentation of collaboration networks, and a thematic transition from general digitalization toward sector-specific AI applications, human capital, and Industry 4.0. The study’s scientific contribution lies in integrating these findings into a Kazakhstan-specific analytical framework in which AI-driven productivity is understood as the combined outcome of technological capabilities, organizational readiness, human capital, and institutional support. This framework provides a basis for comparative research in other emerging and resource-dependent economies. Full article

This paper examines how innovation heterogeneity is associated with employment structure among firms in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). While innovation is often promoted as a pathway to job creation, its employment implications remain contested, particularly in contexts marked by resource constraints, weak infrastructure and uneven skills supply. Using firm-level data from the World Bank Enterprise Survey and the Innovation Follow-up Survey, the study investigates five types of innovation (product, process, organisational, incremental and radical) across five employment outcomes, including total, permanent, temporary, skilled and unskilled employment. Kernel propensity-score matching is used to reduce observable selection bias, with nearest-neighbour matching applied as a robustness check. The findings show that innovation is not uniformly related to employment. While product innovation is mainly linked to permanent and total employment, process innovation is associated with broader employment outcomes. Organisational innovation is more strongly connected to structured, skill-oriented employment than to unskilled employment. Incremental innovation shows the most inclusive employment pattern, whereas radical innovation is largely skill-selective and does not translate into broad-based employment gains. These empirical findings suggest that employment-oriented innovation policy in Sub-Saharan Africa should support adaptive innovation, while complementing advanced innovation with skills development. Full article

Post-2020 changes in cross-country log GDP per capita dispersion are directionally consistent across macroeconomic data systems but concentrated in a few country trajectories. Using the IMF WEO 1980–2024 baseline, a provisional 2025 extension, and a 167-country WEO–WDI–PWT panel for 2000–2023, the analysis compares sigma, level inequality, weighting, contributions, mobility, and horizon. Sigma rises by 0.018–0.024 across the sources. Paired country-resampling intervals support sign stability, not broad-based widening. The top five contributors account for 60.3–66.9% of the variance increase and the top ten for 86.6–96.3%; positive residuals remain after joint exclusion. The WEO 2020–2024 increase was exceeded by only two of the 36 preceding four-year changes, although sigma in 2024 remained below its 2000 level. Gini and Theil decline or remain approximately flat, while fixed-quartile separation and persistent ranks locate the change within a durable hierarchy. The contribution is an integrated diagnostic of scale, weighting, concentration, persistence, and horizon; it neither measures global interpersonal inequality nor establishes a structural reversal of long-run convergence. Full article

This study examines the impact of monetary policy shocks on South African household indebtedness between 1990 and 2021. Utilizing annual time-series data from the South African Reserve Bank and FRED through an auto-regressive distributed lag (ARDL) model, the research identifies a significant negative correlation between interest rates and debt levels. The study concluded that an increase in inflation and interest rates has a negative impact on household indebtedness, concluding that it would be beneficial for citizens if the inflation rate decreased, relieving them of the burden of household debt. It is important for policymakers to take into account the potential impact of maintaining a high interest rate and inflation. Full article

This study investigates how institutional quality conditions the relationship between energy transition and environmental sustainability in nine CIS economies over the period 1996–2024, drawing on annual panel data sourced from the World Development Indicators. In the empirical framework, carbon dioxide emissions are specified as the dependent variable, while industrial output, foreign direct investment (FDI), renewable energy consumption, economic growth, trade openness, overall energy use, and an institutional quality index are included as key determinants of environmental pressure. Methodologically, the paper employs second-generation panel econometric techniques, commencing with cross-sectional dependence diagnostics and panel unit root tests, and proceeding to long-run estimation through FMOLS and CCR. The robustness of these estimates is reinforced using Driscoll-Kraay standard errors, while the System-GMM estimator is applied to address heteroskedasticity, serial correlation, cross-sectional dependence, and endogeneity concerns. The results indicate that industrial activity, energy consumption, and FDI significantly increase CO₂ emissions, whereas greater reliance on renewable energy and stronger institutional quality help to alleviate environmental degradation. Under more rigorous specifications, trade openness and economic growth are found to reduce emissions, pointing to emerging decoupling patterns within CIS countries. Importantly, the interaction between renewable energy and institutional quality reveals a pronounced complementary effect, suggesting that stronger governance frameworks amplify the environmental benefits of energy transition. Taken together, the findings underscore that environmental sustainability across CIS economies is jointly determined by structural, economic, and institutional factors, with institutional quality serving as a critical lever for advancing progress toward SDG 13. Full article

Honduras allocates a substantial share of GDP to public education, yet it continues to record weak human capital outcomes relative to its Central American neighbors. This study tests whether education-spending volume, or instead institutional quality and income inequality, better explains literacy outcomes in Honduras. Using annual data for 2012–2023, the period for which Honduras reports complete education-spending data to the World Bank, we estimate four parsimonious OLS specifications with Newey–West HAC standard errors. Regressors include education spending (% of GDP), government effectiveness, the Gini index, and log GDP per capita. Across all four specifications, education spending is not a robust predictor of adult literacy: it is non-significant in three of the four models (p > 0.10) and reaches conventional significance only in Model 4 (β = 0.606, p < 0.05), a result that is itself specification-dependent given the sign instability of the education-spending coefficient across models. Government effectiveness is positive and significant wherever included (β = 6.64 to 7.61, p < 0.05), and the Gini index is negative and significant wherever included (β = −0.38 to −0.54, p < 0.01), together explaining up to 74% of the variance in adult literacy (Adjusted R² = 0.740) with only twelve annual observations. These findings indicate that institutional quality and income inequality, rather than public spending levels, are the binding constraints on literacy outcomes in Honduras during the period examined. Increasing education budgets without parallel governance reform and redistribution is unlikely, on this evidence, to translate into improved literacy. Full article

This paper examines the correlation between how the digital economy is perceived and how the performance of services in the public sector are perceived in Jordan. A cross-sectional survey of Jordanian citizens (n = 980) was conducted using a structured questionnaire with a 5-point Likert scale. Descriptive statistics, reliability and validity analyses, exploratory factor analysis, multivariate regression analysis, and one-way ANOVA were used to examine the association between the perceived growth of the digital economy and the perceived efficiency and effectiveness of public-sector services. The results reveal that the perceived level of development of the digital economy is statistically significantly and positively associated with the perceived performance of public-sector services, specifically in the areas of efficiency, service accessibility, and transparency (p < 0.05). The results also reflect a lack of awareness of certain limitations in digital literacy and infrastructure adequacies, which may hinder equal access to services. The findings are cross-sectional and perception-based, meaning they can be understood as associations between respondents’ perceptions and not as causal effects on objective institutional performance. The study provides empirical evidence from a developing-country context and applies the concept of perceived improvement in the digital economy and its link to perceived public-sector performance, with practical implications for the digital-governance and capacity-building agenda in Jordan. Full article

Digital markets increasingly coordinate prices, matches, orders, and allocations through automated systems whose decision–execution loops can close faster than humans can intervene. This article develops a microfounded framework in which latency is a temporal feasibility constraint that complements adjustment costs, information delay, costly information acquisition, queueing, and technological execution costs. The model distinguishes common latency, human intervention latency, and relative latency. Common latency is produced by platform and participant investment and affects welfare through the freshness of the state on which decisions are executed. Human intervention is represented by a smooth, task- and organization-specific probability q(L,z,s), derived from a distribution of completion times and modified by interface and organizational support. Human, hybrid, and algorithmic decision technologies differ in speed, accuracy, cost, and systematic misspecification risk. Relative speed is modeled as a strategic priority contest in which each intermediary’s best response depends on rivals’ investments, while platform rules determine the sensitivity and value of being first. The framework derives conditions for human-algorithm substitution, welfare-improving common-speed investment, socially excessive strategic speed investment, and welfare-enhancing batching or latency floors. It separates temporal from structural market distortions, integrates decision-technology quality and state freshness in a total-welfare function, and develops an incidence model that traces gains across heterogeneous users, intermediaries, and infrastructure owners. Robustness results cover diffusion, mean-reverting, jump, stochastic-volatility, and regime-switching state processes. An illustrative dynamic simulation, explicit scope conditions, and an operational empirical agenda show how the theory can be tested without claiming empirical calibration. The central contribution is a non-equivalence result: when latency enters the probability of successful intervention, shortening the decision window can change the technology and locus of marginal choice even when information, objectives, adjustment costs, and the substantive decision rule are held fixed. Full article

In this paper, we formulate a new endogenous growth framework designed for the artificial intelligence era. We theorize AI as a hybrid production factor, possessing the non-rivalrous properties of public knowledge and the rivalrous constraints of computing power. By endogenizing the role of public finance, the model demonstrates that strategic government investment in digital infrastructure and AI-specialized human capital acts as a primary catalyst for the marginal productivity of private capital. We derive the Theorem of Digital Optimality, identifying the optimal allocation of tax revenue between physical hardware and intangible intelligence. Our findings suggest that in an AI-driven economy, public spending generates a significant crowding-in effect, shifting the private investment frontier upward. The model warns that failure to optimize these public inputs leads to digital secular stagnation, in which the lack of sovereign digital platforms bottlenecks private-sector innovation. Full article

This study investigates the impact of real effective exchange rate (REER) volatility on foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows in three major Central and Eastern European (CEE) economies—Hungary, Poland, and Romania—using quarterly data spanning from 2007-Q1 to 2024-Q4. The exchange rate volatility is modeled using a Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity (GARCH) framework, and country-specific relationships are estimated through Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) bounds testing and Toda–Yamamoto causality analysis. Our research indicates that a uniform relationship does not exist across the region. In Hungary, the utilization of directional FDI data excluding Special Purpose Entities (SPEs), in conjunction with structural breaks and quarterly seasonal controls, reveals a statistically significant nonlinear (inverted U-shaped) relationship between long-run exchange rate volatility and FDI inflows. In addition, domestic financial development exerts a substantial buffering effect on the transmission of volatility in Hungary by bypassing SPE flows that previously obscured this effect. In Poland and Romania, a stronger currency consistently discourages investment by reducing cost competitiveness. Romania shows a distinct pattern: volatility initially attracts FDI, and while deeper financial markets meaningfully dampen this effect, the net relationship remains positive, unlike Hungary, where sufficiently deep credit markets fully reverse it. These results suggest that policymakers should look beyond short-term exchange rate stabilization and instead prioritize structural reforms, competitive exchange rate levels, transparent FDI reporting standards, and deeper domestic financial markets to sustain FDI inflows. Full article

Global trade governance is being reshaped as multilateral rulemaking and dispute settlement face persistent constraints. However, it remains unclear whether this development signals institutional decline or a layered allocation of governance functions across interconnected venues. This study develops a functional-allocation framework and examines rulemaking, enforcement, and coordination across the World Trade Organization (WTO), WTO-linked mechanisms, and regional trade agreements (RTAs). The framework distinguishes directly observable functional allocation from functional reallocation as a process-oriented interpretation of institutional change. The analysis combines a mapping of 282 RTA governance events entering into force between 2000 and 2025 with treaty content and institutional design data and a structured comparison of WTO core agreements, differentiated arrangements, enforcement supplements, and plurilateral initiatives. The findings identify a layered trade architecture rather than a simple shift away from the WTO. The WTO retains selected multilateral functions, differentiated arrangements sustain selective cooperation within its framework, and WTO-linked mechanisms supplement constrained appellate enforcement. RTAs provide additional venues for rulemaking, enforcement, and coordination. Among directly classified RTA events, formal adjudication increased from 76.0% in 2000–2004 to 100.0% in 2020–2025. Formal adjudication and institutionalized coordination are also positively associated with core substantive treaty depth. These patterns are consistent with functional allocation across a layered architecture, but do not establish that WTO constraints caused the observed institutional configurations. Full article