Empirica最新文献

One of the leading national and international objectives is to achieve more egalitarian societies. Avoiding gender or digital gaps are priorities generally assumed as concerns of governments and international organizations. This paper evaluates the digital gender divide in its three stages: access, use and results, relating it to gender and salary gaps in the context of the European Union. Cluster analysis was conducted to classify the countries according to their gender digital divide. The influence of age and studies level of males and females was revised. Based on the OECD and EUROSTAT data, an empirical analysis was conducted. By comparison of means, the significant variables influencing the gender digital divide were identified, probing that the educational level significantly influences it, especially in what refers to the third stage. Finally, through a regression analysis, it was proved that the influence of the insecurity and the gender wage gap goes beyond the women and affects society.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10663-022-09555-8.

With ever-increasing political tensions between China and Russia on one side and the EU and the US on the other, it only seems a matter of time until protectionist policies cause a decoupling of global value chains. This paper uses a computable general equilibrium trade model calibrated with the latest version of the GTAP database to simulate the effect of such a decoupling-implemented by doubling non-tariff barriers-between the two blocks on trade and welfare. Imposing import barriers almost completely eliminates bilateral imports. In addition, changes in price levels lead to higher imports and lower exports of the imposing country group from and to the rest of the world. The targeted country group increases exports to the rest of the world and reduces imports. Welfare falls in all countries involved, suggesting that governments should strive to cooperate rather than turn away from each other. By imposing a trade war on Russia, the political West could inflict severe damage on the Russian economy because of the latter's smaller relative economic size.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has caused disruptions in international trade and highlighted the dependency of small open economies in Europe on imports, especially of energy. These events may have changed Europeans' attitude towards globalization. We study two waves of representative population surveys conducted in Austria, one right before the Russian invasion and the other two months later. Our unique dataset allows us to assess changes in the Austrian public's attitudes towards globalization and import dependency as a short-term reaction to economic turbulences and geopolitical upheaval at the onset of war in Europe. We show that two months after the invasion, anti-globalization sentiment in general has not spread, but that people have become more concerned about strategic external dependencies, especially in energy imports, suggesting that citizens' attitudes regarding globalization are differentiated.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10663-023-09572-1.

We examine the effectiveness of different fiscal policies in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (FBiH). For this purpose, we use a structural macroeconomic model for the FBiH. In this model, GDP in the Federation is influenced by world demand and by domestic demand in the Federation. Domestic demand comprises consumption of private households, public consumption, and gross fixed capital formation. Employment depends positively on GDP and negatively on the tax wedge, i.e., the net wage plus social security contribution rates (including the unemployment insurance), and the personal income tax rate in the Federation. The latter allows the analysis of the impact of changes in social security contribution rates or in the income tax rate in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The following Federation-specific policy instruments are implemented in the model for the FBiH: Pension funds contribution rate in FBiH; contribution rate for health insurance in FBiH; contribution rate for the unemployment insurance in FBiH; benefits from social security; direct tax rates (income tax rate, corporate tax rate); public consumption in FBiH. Our results show that policy measures that reduce the tax wedge on labour income are highly effective in stimulating employment. Due to the large elasticity of imports with respect to demand, pure demand-side measures have little impact on real variables, indicating that a small open economy like the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina has only little scope for influencing macroeconomic developments with pure demand management policies. Our results confirm earlier theoretical and empirical studies showing that the labour market can best be influenced positively by reducing the tax wedge. The multipliers of income tax reductions are larger and oscillate more than the effects of the other fiscal policy measures.

We estimate new indices measuring financial and economic uncertainty in the euro area, Germany, France, the United Kingdom and Austria, following the approach of Jurado et al. (Am Econ Rev 105:1177-1216, 2015), which measures uncertainty by the degree of predictability. We perform an impulse response analysis in a vector error correction framework, where we focus on the impact of both local and global uncertainty shocks on industrial production, employment and the stock market. We find that global financial and economic uncertainties have significant negative effects on local industrial production, employment, and the stock market, while we find hardly any influence of local uncertainty on these variables. In addition we perform a forecasting analysis, where we assess the merits of uncertainty indicators for forecasting industrial production, employment and the stock market, using different performance measures. The results suggest that financial uncertainty significantly improves the forecasts of the stock market in terms of profit-based measures, while economic uncertainty gives, in general, more insight when forecasting macroeconomic variables.

The Covid-19 has impacted most spheres of life and continues to influence the future course of socio-economic decisions. The effects of pandemic and virus contraction on the stability of social preferences are however relatively less know. This study examines the effects of the Covid-19 on pro-sociality and general trust by using the LISS panel data (time frame: 2019-2020) from the Netherlands. The fixed effects panel regressions show that pro-social behavior and general trust do not differ pre-and-after the Covid-19. The article further analyzes the stability of pro-sociality and general trust among people who unfortunately contracted the Covid-19 virus and the uninfected ones (time frame: 2019-2020) using difference-in-differences (DD) method to infer a causal effect of infections on preferences. The DD analysis also leads to insignificant causal effect of virus contractions on pro-sociality and trust. However, the sub-group analysis shows a positive causal impact of infections on trust for respondents above 60 years. Overall, both fixed effects regressions and DD analysis suggest that pro-sociality and to a large extent general trust in the Netherlands are stable despite the negative Covid-19 shock.

This article analyzes the progress of the transition from the production of vehicles with internal combustion engines to the production of electric vehicles in eastern Europe. The transition is considered in the context of the development of the automotive industry in eastern Europe since the early 1990s and the relative position of the east European integrated periphery in the European automotive industry value chains and production networks. The article argues that foreign firms are driving the transition, while the role of the east European governments and local firms is much less significant. The transition is slower than in western Europe and eastern Europe will continue to produce internal combustion engine vehicles longer. Eastern Europe will continue to rely on its competitive advantage of low production costs, especially low labor costs, to continue to attract foreign direct investment in the automotive industry. The article considers the consequences of the transition for the position of east European countries in automotive value chains, production networks and the division of labor in the European automotive industry.

The COVID-19 pandemic has thrown the world's economy and trade into disarray, putting international reliance in the limelight. This sparked debate on the durability and resilience of global value chains. In this paper, we construct a 'product riskiness indicator' for 4700 globally traded products based on components such as market concentration, clustering tendencies, network centrality of players, or international substitutability to determine which products are vulnerable to trade shocks at the global level - referred to as 'risky' products. In a second step, bilateral risky product imports are matched to multi-country input-output tables, allowing for an examination of the importance of globally supplied risky products by country and industry. Due to the high percentage of dangerous products in high-tech product categories, higher-tech industries are more vulnerable to supply-chain vulnerabilities. Third, we analyse the GDP impact of reshoring using a "partial global extraction method." Assuming that risky product imports from non-EU27 nations are re-shored to EU27 countries, the EU27 GDP might rise by up to 0.5 percent. Non-EU27 countries suffer as a result of such reshoring activity. This implies that ensuring robust or at least resilient supply networks is also in the interest of the supplier countries and sectors.