Search Results (46)

The European Union has mandated digital reporting of cross-border VAT transactions from 2030, yet quasi-experimental evidence on the official compliance gap remains limited and does not cover the full range of national transaction-reporting architectures. This paper estimates their effect on that gap in 24 member states over 2000 to 2023, coding twelve mandates from the underlying legal instruments and applying the Callaway and Sant’Anna framework with never-treated comparisons. The baseline staggered estimate indicates a 4.23 percentage point reduction (95% CI [−6.45, −1.83]), remaining between 3.73 and 5.43 points across nineteen specifications including an imputation estimator and a neighbour-excluding comparison, and 2.76 under the most conservative identification check. Point estimates more than triple over five years. Pre-adoption coefficients are individually indistinguishable from zero though jointly significant, and formal sensitivity analysis shows the adoption-year and average post-adoption effects withstand modest though not large parallel-trend violations. The results do not show continuous reporting outperforms periodic reporting, and exploratory analysis detects no capacity moderation. What orders the cohort estimates is the completeness of the obligation, since the three mandates reaching one side of the transaction or part of the taxpayer population produce the three weakest effects. Findings support the fiscal premise of the VAT in the Digital Age reform and counsel patient evaluation of the rollout. Full article

This study examines a two-echelon cross-border e-commerce (CBEC) supply chain under the joint constraints of technical barriers to trade (TBTs) and tariffs. To capture the cumulative nature of foreign-market access, the degree of trade barrier breakthrough is modeled as a continuous-time state that converts technological innovation and compliance updating into sustained market access. A differential game is developed to compare centralized, decentralized, and modified two-part tariff contract decisions. The main conclusions are as follows: (1) Decentralized decision-making causes insufficient technological innovation and compliance updating, reducing the steady-state breakthrough level and total supply chain profit. (2) The modified two-part tariff contract internalizes the benefit–cost mismatch between the manufacturer and the retailer, reproducing the centralized investment path and total profit. (3) Government support strengthens barrier-breaking incentives, while the effect of tariffs on decentralized investment depends on the balance between subsidy support and upstream tariff pass-through; tariffs nevertheless reduce the integrated channel margin and may invalidate the contract beyond a critical threshold. (4) Product-life-cycle analysis shows that technological innovation dominates during technology dividend periods, while compliance updating becomes more valuable during bottleneck periods. (5) Multi-scenario simulations and ±20% one-factor perturbations preserve the ranking C = MT > D. These findings extend dynamic supply chain coordination research by linking investment, realized market access, and contract incentives under dual trade barriers, and provide implications for the long-term economic sustainability of CBEC supply chains. Full article

Much of the discourse around FinTech regulation focuses on whether legal frameworks adequately facilitate private-sector innovation. This article argues that the more consequential and underexamined question is whether enacted frameworks are operationally adequate, sufficiently coherent, specific, and institutionally supported to govern the commercial realities of a mature FinTech sector. Using Saudi Arabia as its primary case, this study applies doctrinal legal analysis and thematic document analysis across six regulatory domains: licensing and sandbox governance, data protection, cybersecurity, consumer protection, Shariah compliance, and cross-border regulatory alignment, benchmarked against standards from the United Kingdom, United States, European Union, and United Arab Emirates. These jurisdictions are treated as sources of regulatory technique rather than as demonstrations of regulatory success. The analysis finds significant implementation gaps across all six domains: formal instruments have been enacted, but the transition pathways, proportionate calibrations, inter-agency coordination, and technology-specific rules necessary for operational adequacy remain underdeveloped. Drawing on Amstad’s regulatory objectives-principles-practices taxonomy, regulatory lifecycle theory, and institutional isomorphism, this study advances six targeted reform recommendations. The study concludes that regulatory maturation in emerging FinTech markets requires a deliberate transition from instrument adoption to implementation depth, from duck typing inherited frameworks to selectively coding the genuinely new governance that algorithmic finance demands. Full article

Trusted Data Spaces (TDSs) have emerged as the core infrastructure for secure, privacy-preserving data circulation across industries and jurisdictions. However, state-of-the-art TDS implementations suffer from centralized platform monopoly, rigid cross-border governance failure, unfair value distribution, and poor scalability for global-scale collaboration. This paper proposes DAO-TDS, a novel decentralized autonomous trusted data space paradigm that enables centerless, cryptography-governed, and value-closed-loop data circulation. We make three core contributions: (1) We formalize the first anti-monopoly, incentive-compatible game-theoretic model for distributed TDS governance, with rigorous provable security guarantees; (2) we design an original Proof of Data Contribution (PoDC) consensus mechanism and a post-quantum secure Crypto-DAO governance protocol, with formal security proofs under the Universal Composability (UC) framework; (3) we implement a full prototype of DAO-TDS and conduct comprehensive, reproducible evaluations, showing that it supports 10,000+ distributed nodes with >12,000 TPS and <2 s 99th-percentile confirmation latency, while delivering >80% of generated value to data contributors (vs. <50% in centralized platforms). While the proposed paradigm demonstrates strong performance and security guarantees, it still faces challenges in adaptive cross-jurisdictional compliance and lightweight edge node deployment, which require further investigation. Full article

The North Sea is becoming a shared renewable energy space in which offshore wind deployment, grid planning, market operation and environmental governance increasingly cross borders. This article asks how wind-resource complementarity can inform legal and institutional design for cross-border offshore wind cooperation. It combines a five-year representative-point wind-resource screening analysis using NASA POWER hourly data from 2021 to 2025 with functional legal–institutional analysis. The empirical analysis covers seven offshore or near-offshore representative screening points, hub-height correction to 100 m and 150 m, a wind-power proxy and wind-power-density proxy, low-wind frequency and low-wind event duration, monthly and interannual variability, pairwise correlation, CWCI and weighting sensitivity. The representative-point results suggest a mean 100 m corrected wind-speed range of 8.52 to 9.88 m/s, 4 m/s low-wind frequencies of 8.69% to 12.64%, and a maximum 4 m/s low-wind event of 173.0 h at NO_SOUTH. The baseline CWCI screening identifies DK West–BE Coast, DK West–FR Channel and UK East–FR Channel as leading within-sample pairs. The legal analysis uses these results as screening evidence for questions of data compatibility, hub-height assumptions, low-wind consultation, hybrid offshore grid governance, market coordination, cumulative environmental assessment, investment regulatory space and crisis dispute prevention. The article proposes an operational five-pillar framework with institutions, instruments, implementation steps and compliance pathways. It should be read as an exploratory evidence-to-law screening analysis, not a definitive wind-resource assessment, turbine-output model, capacity-factor estimate or grid-dispatch simulation. Full article

With the rapid development of cross-border collaboration, intelligent port construction, and international logistics networks, large volumes of multisource heterogeneous data are continuously generated during cross-border circulation. To address the limitations of traditional financial review and compliance auditing methods in characterizing multisource signal coupling, as well as the tendency of conventional deep models to rely on spurious correlated features with insufficient interpretability, a multisource sensing signal fusion and causally explainable risk identification framework is proposed for cross-border trade anomaly detection. In this framework, electronic trade texts, structured financial declaration fields, GPS/AIS trajectories, port weighing records, RFID data, electronic seal status, X-ray inspection images, cold-chain temperature and humidity records, and vibration data are uniformly modeled as multisource sensing signals in cross-border trade and circulation processes. Subsequently, collaborative representation among textual semantics, attribute fields, logistics status, device records, and entity relationships is achieved through a cross-modal alignment mechanism. On this basis, an engineering-constraint-guided causal risk representation module is designed to reduce the interference of spurious correlated factors, such as regions, ports, transportation modes, and textual styles, in model decisions. Meanwhile, a counterfactual anomaly response module is introduced to analyze the influence of key variable changes on risk outputs, thereby enhancing the model’s ability to identify and explain true anomaly-driving factors. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves the best overall performance in the cross-border trade anomaly detection task, with Accuracy, Precision, Recall, F1-score, AUC, and PR-AUC reaching $0.927$, $0.842$, $0.811$, $0.826$, $0.958$, and $0.817$, respectively, clearly outperforming baseline models including Logistic Regression, Random Forest, XGBoost, BERT, BERT+MLP, and Multimodal Transformer. In cross-time, cross-region, cross-port, and cross-entity testing scenarios, high F1-score and AUC values are still maintained. Under complex conditions such as text noise, missing modalities, logistics trajectory perturbations, and missing sensing records, only limited performance degradation is observed. Ablation experiments further verify the effective contributions of cross-modal attention, contrastive alignment, causal financial debiasing, counterfactual response, and engineering constraints to performance improvement. Full article

This paper investigates how corporate governance can impact the litigation risk of banks with reference to the board characteristics of the Jordanian banking industry. With a dataset of 14 of the banks listed on the Amman Stock Exchange between the years 2013–2023, the study examines how gender diversity on a board, board size, board independence, foreign board representation, and directors’ financial education affect litigation costs. The analysis is based on agency theory and upper echelons theory and uses pooled ordinary least squares regression. The findings indicate that board characteristics have an uneven impact on litigation risk. The presence of female board members is always related to reduced legal costs, which implies that gender diversity improves the quality of monitoring and control over risks. Conversely, an increased board size and increase in foreign directors and directors of financial education are both linked to increased legal expenses, suggesting coordination issues and unfamiliarity with regulations in the cross-border governance environment. Board independence, however, does not demonstrate any statistically significant correlation with litigation risk. The paper adds to the literature by offering new evidence based on a developing economy with a unique institutional environment. The findings have significant implications for regulators, policymakers, and practitioners seeking to design effective board structures that reduce legal and compliance risks in the banking sector. Full article

The growth of advanced cyber threats has inspired organisations to start using powerful cybersecurity platforms, but the process of selection is analytically challenging due to the multidimensional, uncertain, and conflicting character of the evaluation criteria. The prevailing culture of decision-support frameworks is based on unyielding numerical evaluations that cannot reflect the underlying vagueness of expert judgment and the dynamic interplay of macro-environmental factors. This paper presents a combined Fuzzy Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (FMCDM) system, which uses polygonal fuzzy numbers, in particular pentagonal fuzzy representation, and four other complementary methods of MCDM (Fuzzy AHP, Fuzzy TOPSIS, Fuzzy VIKOR, and Fuzzy COPRAS), integrated by a Borda Count consensus system. Sixteen assessment sub-criteria are logically obtained through an analysis of PESTEL (Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Environmental, and Legal) and weighted using the Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process. The model is used to compare six cybersecurity platforms, including Microsoft Security Framework, CrowdStrike Falcon, Cisco Cybersecurity Portfolio, Palo Alto Networks Cortex, Fortinet Security Fabric, and Sophos Central. In this study, Fuzzy AHP demonstrates that the aggregate weight of political factors is the highest (0.4181), followed by cross-border data management, regulatory compliance, and government incentives as the most popular sub-criteria. According to the results from the Fuzzy TOPSIS, Fuzzy VIKOR, and Fuzzy COPRAS methods, Microsoft Security Framework ranks consistently in the first place, and CrowdStrike Falcon and Cisco Cybersecurity Portfolio were ranked second and third, respectively. The framework presented in the study provides decision-makers with a reproducible, uncertainty-conscious basis for cybersecurity platform selection. Full article

Green fintech operates at the intersection of sustainable finance, digital innovation, and financial-sector risk governance. It promises to improve the allocation of capital toward environmentally sustainable activities by lowering information costs, scaling disclosure tools, automating environmental verification, and widening access to green investment products. Yet the same digital features that make green fintech attractive—speed, scalability, data intensity, platform intermediation, cross-border distribution, and algorithmic decision-making—can also transform apparently local regulatory weaknesses into broader financial-stability concerns. This article examines how regulatory risk associated with green fintech may evolve into systemic risk under conditions of market concentration, weak data governance, regulatory fragmentation, greenwashing amplification, and financial interconnectedness. It develops a mechanism-based conceptual framework rather than an econometric test. The framework connects three regulatory dimensions—regulatory clarity and scope, supervisory consistency, and innovation facilitation—with five systemic-risk transmission channels: market concentration, data and model risk, regulatory arbitrage, greenwashing amplification, and financial interconnectedness. The article draws on sustainable-finance regulation, the financial-stability literature, fintech scholarship, and official supervisory documents, including the EU Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation, the EU Taxonomy Regulation, the Digital Operational Resilience Act, and the ESG Ratings Regulation. The central argument is cautious but policy-relevant: green fintech does not automatically create systemic risk, but regulatory uncertainty and supervisory gaps may become systemic when they are embedded in digital infrastructures that scale quickly and are relied upon by multiple financial institutions. The article contributes to risk scholarship by shifting the analysis from compliance-level regulatory risk to transmission mechanisms through which green-finance innovation may affect market integrity and financial stability. Full article

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), adopted by the European Union in 2018, aims to enhance consumer trust and market efficiency by strengthening data protection. The concurrent stringent compliance requirements raise operational costs and could reshape competition by favoring larger firms with greater regulatory capacity. While the GDPR reduces data-related risks and promotes global digital trade through its extraterritorial reach, the potential advantage to larger firms could incentivize strategic responses such as mergers and acquisitions (M&A) to consolidate market power. Given the rapid expansion of Chinese digital firms in e-commerce, social media, and cloud services across the EU, this study examines how the GDPR has affected their cross-border M&A activities between 2014 and 2021. Based on difference-in-difference analysis, the study finds that the GDPR did not have a statistically significant impact on the number or value of mergers and acquisitions by Chinese digital firms in the EU in the short term. This suggests that firms may enhance their institutional adaptability by strengthening their compliance capabilities. However, institutional and cultural differences pose long-term entry barriers for the firms. The study contributes by highlighting how firms adjust internationalization strategies under stringent regulatory regimes, offering policy-relevant insights for governments and regulatory authorities. Full article

To address the risks of cross-border transmission of pathogenic microorganisms posed by the failure or non-compliance of shipboard ballast water treatment systems, ports urgently require efficient and flexible emergency response solutions. This study presents a novel, containerized, integrated ship-to-shore emergency response system specifically designed for the rapid inactivation of pathogenic microorganisms in ballast water. The core innovation lies in the integration of a three-degree-of-freedom (3-DOF) hydraulic robotic arm, a vision and positioning system, and a dynamic inflatable sealing structure designed for rapid, automated docking with a ship’s ballast water discharge outlet (DN250), thereby enhancing operational safety and efficiency. The system employs a purely physical treatment process of “ultrasound (US) pre-treatment + dual-stage ultraviolet (UV) disinfection,” allowing for reception and treatment without secondary chemical pollution. The integrated treatment train, consisting of US (30 kHz, 7.6–12 kW, minimum acoustic energy density ≥ 0.45 J/cm²) followed by dual-stage UV disinfection (minimum UV dose: 147 mJ/cm²), maintained effective microbial inactivation at turbidity levels of 15, 125, 250, and 500 NTU. US alone showed little direct bactericidal effect, whereas the first UV stage achieved log reduction values (LRVs) of 3.31–4.13, and the complete US + UV + UV process achieved total LRVs of 5.07–7.34 for Escherichia coli. The results showed that dual-stage UV disinfection was key to achieving high inactivation efficacy (p < 0.001), while ultrasound, despite its limited direct bactericidal effect, may have facilitated downstream UV disinfection within the sequential treatment train. This system not only fills a critical gap in port biosecurity emergency infrastructure but also provides an experimentally validated, efficient, environmentally friendly, and flexibly deployable shore-based solution. Full article

South Korea is a highly import-dependent food economy and therefore offers a useful case for examining how an integrated national food control system can be built under trade openness, limited domestic agricultural capacity and changing consumer risk perceptions. This article presents a structured narrative review, rather than a causal impact evaluation, of South Korea’s transition from multi-agency food safety regulation toward an integrated, risk-based food control system. The review is organized through the FAO/WHO national food control system framework and maps Korean legal, institutional and operational evidence onto six analytical dimensions: legal foundations, institutional coordination, risk-based official controls, import supervision, traceability and recall, and risk communication. Examples of embedded risk-analysis principles include the Positive List System for pesticide residues with a default limit of 0.01 mg/kg for substances without a Korean MRL, inspection orders and risk-ranked import controls, barcode-linked recall blocking through the Hazardous Food Sales Prevention System, and public disclosure of unsafe directly purchased overseas products. Quantitative evidence is used descriptively: Korea’s agricultural and food imports reached USD 45.3 billion in 2024, hepatitis A notifications fell from 17,598 in 2019 to 3989 in 2020 after the salted-clam outbreak, and MFDS reported that 12 of 544 overseas direct-purchase products tested in the first half of 2020 contained restricted substances. These indicators suggest improvements in coordination and crisis response capacity, but they do not prove that institutional integration alone reduced foodborne disease incidence. The review finds that South Korea’s model is strongest in institutional consolidation, import-oriented technical standards and digital recall communication, while key challenges remain in small-business compliance burden, scientific independence, data transparency, cross-border e-commerce and novel foods such as cell-cultured food ingredients. Full article

The rapid expansion of global stablecoins is generating new challenges for monetary sovereignty, financial stability, and cross-border regulatory governance. This paper develops an integrated analytical framework of “risk transmission–institutional constraints–compliance response–dynamic monitoring” to examine how stablecoin-related risks may be transmitted into China’s financial system. Drawing on financial risk theory, institutional analysis, and comparative regulatory perspectives, the study identifies three major channels of risk transmission: monetary sovereignty erosion, financial stability shocks, and regulatory arbitrage accompanied by legal and data-governance challenges. It argues that the actual impact of these risks is shaped by China’s specific institutional and technological conditions, including cross-border jurisdictional frictions, technical standard barriers, coordination difficulties under “one country, two systems”, and limitations in regulatory technology capacity. On this basis, the paper proposes a multi-layered compliance response system centered on risk-based penetrative supervision, strict corporate compliance boundaries, and the digital renminbi (e-CNY) as core infrastructure, while emphasizing the need for stronger international regulatory coordination. It further introduces a dynamic monitoring perspective to evaluate regulatory effectiveness, risk suppression, and the substitution effect of the e-CNY ecosystem. The paper contributes a structured and policy-oriented framework for understanding and containing external stablecoin risks in China’s institutional context. Full article

This paper proposes a CBDC design trilemma, the claim that central banks cannot simultaneously maximize privacy, financial stability, and regulatory compliance when designing retail central bank digital currencies and finds the existing literature consistent with this proposition. Through a systematic review of 140 peer-reviewed articles (Web of Science SCIE/SSCI indexes, 2014–2026, supplemented by Scopus and SSRN), evidence is synthesized across four thematic dimensions: design frameworks and architecture, financial stability and banking risk, privacy and security trade-offs, and user adoption and institutional quality. Cross-tabulation of coded data supports all three pairwise tensions: privacy-enhancing designs weaken AML/CFT enforcement, anonymous holdings amplify bank-run risk, and stringent prudential safeguards constrain transaction monitoring. The literature converges on two-tier, hybrid architectures with tiered privacy as the dominant compromise a “zone of feasible design”, that sacrifices full optimality on each vertex. Nine research gaps are identified, most critically the scarcity of empirical evidence from live deployments, the neglect of wholesale CBDC, and insufficient analysis of cross-border interoperability. The framework offers policymakers a structured lens for evaluating retail CBDC design trade-offs and researchers a testable proposition for future empirical work. Full article

Global decarbonization and the rapid growth of distributed energy resources increase the need for information-centric mechanisms that can support secure, scalable, cross-border coordination under heterogeneous technical and regulatory conditions. This paper proposes a Global Virtual Prosumer (GVP) framework that integrates IoT sensing, multi-agent coordination, and permissioned blockchain smart contracts to operationalize cross-border energy services as auditable service commitments rather than physical power exchange. Building on prior work that validated MAS-based power management and blockchain-secured operation within individual Virtual Prosumers, the present contribution lies in the cross-border coordination layer and its associated contractual and evaluation mechanisms, not in the constituent technologies themselves. A layered IoT–AI–blockchain architecture is introduced, where off-chain optimization produces allocations and admissibility indicators and on-chain contracts enforce identity, feasibility guards, delegation and partner-assignment rules, oracle verification, and settlement time compliance outcomes. The contractual lifecycle is formalized through four smart-contract algorithms covering trade registration, conditional delegation, cooperative fulfillment, and cross-border settlement with explicit failure semantics and event-based audit trails. The framework is evaluated on a global case study with seven Virtual Prosumers and quantified using contract-centric KPIs that capture registration time rejections, settlement success versus non-compliance, oracle-driven failure attribution, and full lifecycle traceability. The results demonstrate internal consistency of the proposed lifecycle and the practical value of KPI-driven accountability for cross-border energy service coordination. At the same time, the evaluation is based on synthetic parameterization and an emulated contract environment; realistic deployment constraints—including consensus latency, cross-region communication reliability, and regulatory overlap—are discussed as explicit limitations and directions for future empirical validation. Full article