Search Results (1,711)

Financial reform has become a key driver in promoting high-quality entrepreneurship among farmers and fostering rural economic development. This study exploits the establishment of national-level Financial Reform Pilot Zones (FRPs) as a quasi-natural experiment. By applying a time-varying difference-in-differences (DID) model to seven waves of China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) data (2010–2022), we find that: (1) Financial reform significantly promotes high-quality entrepreneurship among farmers. (2) This effect is primarily driven by the expansion of digital inclusive finance, while the social credit system serves as a significant positive moderator in the relationship between financial reform and entrepreneurial quality. (3) Further analysis reveals significant heterogeneity across different functional types of FRPs and across different industry. The overarching goal of this study is to causally identify whether and how financial reform influences the quality of rural entrepreneurship. Our findings provide empirical evidence and scalable insights for developing economies seeking to implement financial supply-side structural reform. Full article

Purpose: This paper examines what predicts digital financial inclusion among already high-income, well-governed countries, reversing the usual causal framing that treats inclusion as a driver rather than an outcome of institutional quality, financial sector development, and digital infrastructure legacy. Design/methodology/approach: Using a panel of 38 OECD countries (2000–2022, 874 country-years), account ownership and digital payment use are modeled as fractional response variables decomposed into within- and between-country components, with Tobit and Worldwide Governance Indicator cross-sectional robustness checks. Findings: Government effectiveness predicts inclusion almost entirely through persistent between-country differences, not within-country governance change. Early broadband rollout and submarine cable proximity independently predict higher digital payment use. This infrastructure-legacy result is weaker for account ownership and, per the actual-survey-year robustness, less robust for digital payment use as well. A conventional two-way fixed-effects specification, which cannot separate within- from between-country variation, finds no institutional relationship at all. Rule of law and regulatory quality carry most of this institutional effect, though political stability is also independently significant; voice and accountability is the weakest and least consistent dimension. Research limitations/implications: The decomposition establishes association, not causation; the governance-dimension check is cross-sectional rather than a full panel. The central institutional-quality result is robust to restricting the panel to actual, non-interpolated Findex survey-wave years (government effectiveness remains significant at p = 0.038 for account ownership and p = 0.011 for digital payment use, versus p = 0.026 and p = 0.001 on the full interpolated panel); however, one secondary infrastructure finding is not. Practical implications: The evidence here, which is associational rather than causal, is consistent with prioritizing digital payment infrastructure over governance reform as a short-run inclusion strategy, while continuing to invest in the rule of law for its longer-run structural payoff. Originality/value: The paper reverses the standard causal framing in the digital financial inclusion literature and combines five data sources within a single OECD panel not previously analyzed together. Full article

As a path to promote undergraduate student success in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM), this paper introduces the Conceptual Organizational Framework for Expanding Excellence (COFFEE), which is informed by the longitudinal adaptation of the Meyerhoff Scholars Program at a large, research-intensive historically white institution. Drawing on over a decade of program evaluation and academic research, we articulate how foundational cultural ethos—shared values, STEM community, and affirming multidimensional identity environments—are transversally integrated across the structural, agentic, and academic architecture of institutional practice. The framework advances the literature by positioning core organizational conditions for STEM persistence and excellence. This work offers a theoretically grounded organizational model informed by organizational theory and prior empirical work documenting the ongoing success of a STEM program to guide research, practice, and systemic reform in STEM education. Full article

Background/Motivation: Tax avoidance represents a persistent governance and fiscal challenge in emerging-market economies; however, its role as a mediating channel between firm-level strategic determinants and profitability remains underexplored in the Indonesian multinational context. Objective: This study examines whether transfer pricing, corporate social responsibility (CSR), managerial ownership, institutional ownership, and earnings management influence firm profitability through the intermediating mechanism of tax avoidance in Indonesian manufacturing multinational corporations (MNCs). Method: Using panel data from 31 IDX-listed MNCs over 2018–2023 (186 firm-year observations), we apply random effects panel regression and Sobel mediation tests, with robustness checks using Book-Tax Difference (BTD) as an alternative proxy, a lagged-variable specification, and an extended control variable set including financial leverage, capital intensity, sales growth, and year fixed effects. Endogeneity is assessed via the Durbin–Wu–Hausman test. Results: None of the five determinants significantly influences GAAP ETR, and tax avoidance does not significantly mediate any determinant–profitability relationship. Only institutional ownership exerts a significant direct effect on profitability (β = 0.002381, p < 0.05). Contribution: This is the first study to comprehensively test a five-determinant simultaneous mediation model in the Indonesian MNC context. The findings reveal that the mediation architecture commonly documented in developed-market contexts does not hold in Indonesian MNCs—attributable to institutional enforcement gaps, concentrated ownership structures, and the symbolic nature of CSR in emerging markets—with direct implications for Indonesian tax policy and corporate governance reform. Full article

Background: Nonfatal strangulation (NFS) is one of the most lethal forms of intimate partner violence (IPV) that is associated with increased risk of future homicide, yet it frequently goes unrecognized within healthcare settings. Black women experience disproportionately high rates of IPV while simultaneously facing structural barriers to healthcare access. Little research has examined how Black women survivors experience strangulation and navigate decisions about seeking care following NFS and other potentially lethal forms of IPV. Methods: This secondary qualitative analysis draws on interview data from 28 Black women survivors of IPV who participated in a larger community-engaged mixed-methods study conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic in an Upper Midwestern state. Of these, 17 (60.7%) both reported experiencing strangulation on the parent-study survey and described experiences consistent with nonfatal strangulation during their qualitative interviews and comprised the analytic sample for the present analysis. Guided by Black Feminist Thought, semi-structured interviews examined survivors’ experiences with violence, safety, help-seeking, and interactions with healthcare and social service systems. Data were analyzed using thematic analysis following Schensul and Schensul. Results: Three interconnected themes were identified. First, survivors described racism and anticipated discrimination as significant barriers to seeking healthcare following strangulation. Second, shame, stigma, and fear of judgment contributed to self-silencing and avoidance of formal services. Third, survivors described strangulation as a terrifying and potentially lethal form of violence occurring within broader histories of polyvictimization and cumulative trauma. Despite experiencing serious symptoms, many participants avoided healthcare because they feared retaliation from abusive partners, anticipated dismissive treatment, or believed healthcare systems would be unable to protect them. Together, these experiences illustrate how structural racism, institutional mistrust, and gendered violence intersect to shape healthcare decision-making. Conclusions: Findings suggest that barriers to care following strangulation extend beyond individual help-seeking behaviors and are deeply rooted in structural inequities. Improving outcomes for Black women survivors requires enhanced provider training on strangulation assessment, trauma- and violence-informed approaches, culturally responsive care, and healthcare system reforms that address racism, mistrust, and survivor safety. These findings have important implications for reducing disparities in IPV-related health outcomes and improving responses to high-lethality violence. Full article

Industrial structure policies for specialty agriculture aim to optimize production, product, and industrial structures in China, yet their effect on land use performance through local government competitive actions remains underexplored. Using a balanced panel dataset covering 292 prefecture-level and above cities in China from 2010 to 2023, this study treats China’s Agricultural Supply-Side Structural Reform (ASSR) as a quasi-natural experiment and employs a generalized difference-in-differences model to examine the effects and mechanisms of industrial structure policies on land use performance in specialty agriculture. The results indicate that industrial structure policies significantly improve land use performance in specialty agriculture, with local government competitive actions in product quality improvement, market channel development, and industrial integration serving as three important transmission mechanisms. In addition, the policy effect is particularly pronounced in non-provincial capital cities, non-major grain-producing areas, and regions southeast of China’s Hu Line, and stronger market integration further amplifies this effect. The study contributes a multidimensional land use performance framework and a local government competition channel for understanding how macro-level industrial policies translate into land use performance, with implications for differentiated land governance in developing economies. Full article

The relationship between public education spending and economic growth remains contested in developing economies, where quality, not just quantity, of investment may matter most. This study examines whether public education expenditure has driven economic growth in Egypt over 1980–2023, addressing the under-studied role of education quality and testing the robustness of the estimated relationship to structural breaks linked to major reforms. Using the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) bounds testing approach together with Zivot–Andrews structural break unit root tests and CUSUM/CUSUMSQ parameter-stability tests, the study models short- and long-run effects of education expenditure on GDP growth, controlling for capital formation, labor participation, trade openness, and foreign investment, and incorporating quality proxies such as student–teacher ratios and completion rates. The bound F-statistic (6.23) exceeds the 5% upper-bound critical value of 3.83 (Narayan in 2005 on small-sample critical values), confirming long-run cointegration, and the error-correction coefficient (−0.835, p < 0.01) indicates rapid adjustment to equilibrium. Physical capital is the strongest driver of long-run growth, while education expenditure shows a weakly negative long-run association (significant at 10%), suggesting allocative inefficiency rather than absent returns; quality proxies (completion rate, student–teacher ratio) show a negative short-run and positive one-period-lagged effect, consistent with a delayed adjustment process. Stability tests confirm the long-run relationship is structurally invariant once short-run dynamics are accounted for. Thus, improving the efficiency and quality of education spending, rather than its volume, appears essential for Egypt to advance Vision 2030, SDG 4, and SDG 8. Full article

Prison unrest raises a governance tension between restoring institutional order and protecting the rights, safety, and dignity of persons in custody. This study examines how publicly visible digital sources framed the July 2026 Negombo Prison unrest in Sri Lanka during a 48 h observation period. The primary corpus comprised 47 items from Facebook (25), YouTube (8), X (8), and public blogs (6), analyzed through cross-platform digital discourse analysis. Six dominant frames were identified: immediate casualty and incident reporting; accountability, family information, and institutional inquiry; security and alleged criminal causation; overcrowding and systemic prison conditions; humanitarian condolence; and officer-centered mourning or victimization. No single frame exceeded 25.5% of the corpus, indicating narrative plurality rather than one controlling interpretation. Proximate criminal explanations coexisted with structural accounts of prison governance, while concern for incarcerated persons’ rights coexisted with recognition of prison officers’ deaths and occupational vulnerability. Facebook engagement was highly concentrated, showing that visibility should not be equated with frame prevalence, endorsement, or public opinion. The study concludes that institutional legitimacy during custodial crises is negotiated through overlapping claims concerning order, proportionality, accountability, victimhood, and reform. Full article

Legal systems evolve continuously in response to legislative reforms, emerging judicial interpretations, and shifting societal expectations, making it increasingly difficult to anticipate changes in legal precedent using conventional analytical methods. This study introduces an explainable artificial intelligence framework for predictive jurisprudence that captures the temporal evolution of legal reasoning by jointly modeling semantic, structural, and causal relationships within judicial decisions. The proposed framework integrates neural temporal graph networks to learn evolving citation dependencies, dynamic topic modeling to characterize changes in legal doctrines over time, and causal-inference techniques to distinguish genuine jurisprudential influence from spurious associations. To enhance transparency, the predictive process is complemented by GNNExplainer, enabling the identification of the legal principles, precedents, and citation patterns that most strongly influence model predictions. The framework is evaluated using the Free Law Project and LePaRD benchmark datasets and demonstrates superior performance over existing approaches in detecting causal judicial influences and accurately quantifying precedent evolution. Its practical applicability and interpretability are further validated through expert legal assessment and historical backtesting against documented jurisprudential shifts. The experimental findings demonstrate that integrating explainable machine learning with causal legal analytics provides reliable early indicators of doctrinal change, offering valuable decision-support capabilities in legal environments. Full article

In the context of growing international recognition of geospatial information as a strategic driver of evidence-based decision-making, digital transformation, and sustainable development, robust assessment frameworks are essential for guiding the development of National Spatial Data Infrastructures (NSDIs). This paper presents the first baseline assessment of Senegal’s NSDI using the United Nations Integrated Geospatial Information Framework (UN-IGIF). Drawing on the UN-IGIF Diagnostic Tool, supplemented by surveys, semi-structured interviews, and multi-stakeholder consultations, the analysis reveals a low overall maturity level (33/100), despite relatively better performance in institutional governance and geospatial data availability. Significant weaknesses persist in the areas of legislation, funding, standards implementation, innovation, partnerships, communication, and capacity building. The findings confirm the relevance of the UN-IGIF for assessing challenges related to geospatial governance in Francophone African countries and identify priority areas for reform, including strengthening coordination mechanisms, legal and regulatory modernization, sustainable financing, and strategic planning. By providing empirical evidence on both the NSDI maturity level and the operational applicability of the UN-IGIF, this study contributes to the international literature on geospatial governance and offers a solid foundation for future reforms in Senegal and other low- and middle-income countries. Full article

When national-level market-oriented agricultural reforms enter regional agricultural systems with different land-use structures, production infrastructure, and degrees of institutional dependence, they may generate spatially uneven political responses. Focusing on Punjab and Madhya Pradesh, India, this study integrates agricultural reform policy documents, public procurement statistics, MODIS land-cover data for 2013, 2017, 2020, and 2023, irrigation statistics for the 2013–2014 to 2022–2023 agricultural years, and protest-event records from the Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone (GDELT) Event Database for 25 September 2020 to 11 December 2021. We examine agricultural land-use intensity, cropland fragmentation, gross irrigated area, and the district-level coverage, spatial concentration, and cross-quarter persistence of protest events. Punjab maintained an agricultural land-use intensity of approximately 95%, a cropland patch density of 2.50–4.27 patches per 1000 km², and only a 0.56% increase in gross irrigated area, indicating a mature agricultural space characterized by intensive land use, continuous cropland, and stable irrigation. By contrast, agricultural land-use intensity in Madhya Pradesh increased from 75.24% to 77.63%, cropland patch density declined from 17.40 to 13.15 patches per 1000 km², and gross irrigated area increased by 70.87%, indicating a transitional agricultural space marked by gradual land expansion, increasing cropland connectivity, and rapid irrigation growth. Protest events were more widespread and persistent in Punjab but more concentrated in Madhya Pradesh. These findings show that agricultural land expansion, cropland fragmentation, or irrigation growth alone cannot explain regional differences in farmer protests. Rather, the observed regional differences are more consistent with an interpretation emphasizing the interaction between differentiated agricultural spaces and existing institutional arrangements, including minimum support prices, public procurement, and Agricultural Produce Market Committee markets. The study develops an integrated institutional–spatial framework for explaining uneven regional responses to uniform agricultural reform. Full article

We develop a five-variable coupled dynamical system modeling the structural transition of contemporary capitalism toward technofeudalism. The state variables: feudal capital ($F$), productive capital ($K$), elite overproduction ($E$), systemic debt ($D$), and natural resources ($R$) interact through Lotka–Volterra competition, logistic saturation, and bilinear feedback, supplemented by a bounded logistic Gini diagnostic ($G$). We define collapse operationally as the simultaneous breach of three or more of five reference thresholds (feudal dominance, elite crisis, debt insolvency, resource exhaustion, extreme inequality). Because the inequality threshold is already met at $t_0$, $T_c$ is set by the feudal-dominance crossing and is definitional in part: excluding $G$, or counting only indicators not yet breached at $t_0$, yields $\approx 2053$ (debt insolvency), and varying the rule spans 2031–2075. Parameters are set within theory-motivated ranges against sparse historical points over 1990–2023; because the inverse problem is severely ill-conditioned, they are not treated as precisely estimated, and the model is exploratory rather than a forecasting instrument. The baseline indicates a threshold-driven transition on the order of one generation, with an indicative collapse time $T_c\approx 2044$ (central 90% conditional sensitivity range $\approx$ 2039–2052 under a ±30% independent-perturbation design); we report these as conditional descriptors of model behavior, not predictive probabilities. Across a 5000-member ensemble, the robust finding is qualitative: no realization avoided collapse before 2070, constraining the direction and ordering of the dynamics rather than the inevitability of any date. Sobol analysis identifies the feudal expansion rate $\alpha$ and crowding coefficient $\delta$ as dominant drivers; a frozen-Jacobian eigenvalue trace is positive at the 2024 state (${\lambda }_{max}=+0.016>0$) and turns negative around 2030; reported as an instantaneous growth diagnostic along a nonequilibrium trajectory, not as a stability criterion. In the model, no single-domain reform prevents collapse, whereas coordinated antitrust, ecological, and financial intervention yields superadditive delay (>56 years). No observations are withheld from the parameter specification, so every figure is in-sample, and the dates are ordinal markers of sequence, not forecasts. Extending the HANDY and Goodwin–Keen tradition, this is, to our knowledge, the first dynamical-systems operationalization of technofeudalism: a diagnostic laboratory with explicit, falsifiable thresholds. Full article

The transition to clean energy in China’s traditional industrial regions requires technological substitution and fundamentally restructures the relationship among the state, the market, and enterprises. This study examines the influence of industrial legacy and governance structures on clean energy innovation in Northeast China, with a primary focus on Jilin and comparative analyses of Liaoning and Heilongjiang. Using patent data from 2000 to 2025, we employ Shannon entropy, location quotients and logistic modeling to analyze innovation dynamics across temporal, structural, spatial and institutional dimensions. Our analysis reveals three governance regimes reflecting different industrial legacies and identifies a significant mismatch between resources and innovation: resource-rich cities generate a low number of patents relative to their resources. A high invalidation rate suggests maintenance deficits in publicly funded innovation. These patterns imply that governance arrangements may contribute to the structural weaknesses observed in regional innovation systems. We propose a differentiated strategic framework adapted to the industrial legacy of each province, suggesting that old industrial bases require reforms addressing both resource endowment and institutional capacity. Our findings have implications for regional innovation governance in resource-dependent economies undergoing energy transition. Full article

We study the effects of green finance reform on firms’ long-term investment using data from a Chinese green finance pilot policy introduced in 2017 and panel data on listed firms covering an eleven-year period. We find that the policy significantly increases long-term investment, with the effect accounting for approximately 17.86% of the sample mean. This positive effect mainly operates by easing firms’ financing constraints, improving firms’ financing maturity structure, and mitigating uncertainty at both the operational and market levels. Heterogeneity analyses reveal that the policy effect is more pronounced among mature firms, non-state-owned enterprises, firms with financially experienced directors, supervisors, and senior managers, and those in non-pollution-intensive industries and competitive markets. Full article

As an important policy instrument for promoting regional integration, county-to-district reform plays a significant role in advancing coordinated regional development and optimizing the market-based allocation of factors. Using a balanced panel of 278 Chinese prefecture-level cities from 2011 to 2022, this study treats county-to-district reform as a quasi-natural experiment and employs a staggered difference-in-differences (DID) model to identify its effect on industrial land-factor misallocation. Industrial land-factor misallocation is measured by the deviation between the marginal product of industrial land and its market price, and mechanism tests are conducted to examine the roles of economic agglomeration, industrial agglomeration, and innovative talent agglomeration. This study finds that county-to-district reform alleviates industrial land factor misallocation, and this conclusion remains robust after a series of robustness checks. Mechanism tests show that the reform promotes economic agglomeration, industrial agglomeration, and innovative talent agglomeration, thereby improving industrial land allocation. Heterogeneity analysis reveals that the mitigating effect of county-to-district reform on industrial land factor misallocation varies across cities with different characteristics. Further analysis shows that the reform increases industrial land transfer revenue and prices and improves the structure of land supply. This study deepens the understanding of the relationship between administrative restructuring and land-factor allocation and provides policy implications for improving industrial land allocation through institutional reform. Full article