Economic Systems最新文献

At the 2010 G20 Summit, the use of formal financial services was recognized as one of the main pillars of the global development agenda. At the same time, the fifth goal of the Sustainable development agenda outlined the importance of gender inclusion for sustainable development. Empirical research on the effect of gender inclusion on inclusive finance has however been limited to micro level studies. This study aims to verify the effect of gender political inclusion on financial inclusion on a sample of 37 African countries from 2004–2020. The empirical methodology involves the OLS, the Tobit regression and the System GMM methodologies. The results from these methods show that gender political inclusion is enhancing on financial inclusion in Africa, and this finding is robust across alternative specifications of gender inclusion and inclusive finance. Besides, governance exhibits a positive synergy effect with gender political inclusion on inclusive finance. Policy implications are discussed.

Workers are failing to move to the most productive industries, despite the offer of higher wages. In order to explain this phenomenon, we provide evidence that when an industry experiences a positive, labour-productivity shock, it is subsequently harder for firms to find workers. This is represented by a fall in relative matching efficiency. We present a stylised two-sector search and matching model to show the consequences of this negative relationship. Our calibrated model not only closely tracks US wages and employment share over time, but also reveals substantial output losses as a result of labour misallocation between industries.

We study whether the interplay between monetary and fiscal policies work both ways, in EU countries, for the period 1995–2019. Our results show notably that: i) the inflation rate has a relevant impact over the central banks’ decision making; ii) the cyclically adjusted primary balance reacts positively to increases in the level of government debt; iii) monetary policy reaction functions do not seem to take into consideration the cyclically adjusted primary balance; iv) fiscal policy, via the cyclically adjusted primary balance, seem to be affected by the short-term interest rate in a negative way. The global economic and financial crisis impacted negatively both the short-term nominal interest rates and the cyclically adjusted primary balance, however with a higher degree in the euro area.

This study seeks to construct a global volatility network for a large number of energy firms and explore the mechanisms of risk transmission of energy stock markets at the corporate, national, and regional levels by applying an elastic-net-VAR method. A semiparametric function coefficient model is introduced to test the time-varying influence of oil price uncertainty (OVX) on the stability of the energy system. The results reveal that volatility spillovers across global energy firms are strong and crisis-sensitive. The 2008 financial crisis and COVID-19 pandemic have significantly increased the connectedness of the energy system. Transnational risk transmission assumes the main part of risk migration among energy enterprises and becomes more pronounced in crisis periods. Energy companies in Europe and North America are the main risk transmitters, whereas those in Asia are the chief risk receivers. Moreover, OVX has a positive effect on the volatility spillover of the energy system, and the effect is significantly enhanced during the breakout of extreme events. These findings conclude that tracking risk connectedness in the energy system and understanding its key drivers are important for investment decisions and regulatory policy settings involving energy.

This study investigates the economic growth implications of ongoing and prospective rises in corporate tax rates following G20 countries’ minimum corporation tax agreement. We use a panel data estimation approach to examine economic growth rates and associated macro-economic variables of 42 nations from 1990 to 2017. To elicit more comprehensive insights, we make a distinction between advanced countries (ACs) and emerging market economies (EMEs) and different levels of growth using a quantile estimation approach. The results reveal that corporate tax rate rises depress growth, with a relatively sizeable impact for EMEs, whereas it is not statistically significant for ACs. At high quantiles of growth rates, the impact of the corporate tax policy on growth increases. These findings suggest a dual effect for EMEs with relatively high growth rates and symmetric growth effects of corporate tax changes, necessitating innovative policy prescriptions to address the negative growth impact of prospective higher corporate tax rates.

The study assesses the impact of eight sources of financing (internal funds, bank loans, credit lines, trade credit, equity, grants, leasing and factoring) on innovation and firm growth. It provides evidence that not all external financing sources have the same impact on innovation and growth. Output additionality on turnover growth seems higher for equity financing. In contrast, employment growth appears to be more associated with financing sources linked to increased fixed assets or the solving of liquidity problems. The number of financing instruments used together also seems to matter, revealing the existence of complementarities.

This paper sheds light on the role of informal economy, defined as all economic activities that are hidden from official authorities for various reasons, in financial development convergence. Using panel data from 156 countries over the period of 1991–2017, we find that financial development (as measured by credit as share of GDP) tends to converge across countries over time, particularly when informality is lower. As the size of informal economy becomes larger, however, financial development convergence weakens, and eventually can turn out to be divergence. This finding suggests that policies addressing informality can help countries with lower levels of financial development catch up with the countries with more developed financial systems. It also has implications for the evolution of cross-country income differences, considering the role of financial development in economic performance. In the last part of the paper, we find evidence consistent with this. The results show that higher informality is also associated with weaker income convergence across countries over time.

First, the paper gives a critical appraisal of recently proposed quality adjustments of the ratio of private credit to the gross domestic product (GDP) as a proxy for finance in empirical tests of the finance-growth nexus and cautions against such heuristic measures. Second, in response to the unidimensional feature of conventionally applied proxies for finance, the paper constructs a variable for financial development (FD metric) that measures the relative distance of a financial system from its best attainable performance in terms of depth, access, efficiency, and stability. The measurement is grounded in the principles of data envelopment analysis for ratio data and is built on structural indicators available in the Global Financial Development Database by the World Bank. Using annual data for 157 countries over the period 1993–2020, the paper then explores the finance-growth nexus using several financial metrics in panel-data regression models and considering nonlinearity in both a parametric and semiparametric manner. Economic growth is found to react negatively to finance, whereas this detrimental effect strengthens beyond a certain level of financial depth. In contrast, the access, efficiency, and stability of the financial sector are less important for growth. Hence, the findings lend weight to an economic policy focused primarily on a minimal size of the financial sector that permits its smooth operations, without the need to ensure that the financial sector performs qualitatively at its best.

Advanced countries have experienced a general rise in income inequality, whereas the outlook for income inequality in developing countries is mixed. As such, reduction in income inequality continues to be an important socio-economic development goal in many countries in the twenty-first century. Furthermore, it remains unclear whether the slow progress in reducing income inequality is a manifestation of the prevailing aging population. Using a sample of countries that are currently considered aging, aged, and super-aged countries in the Asia-Pacific region, the paper empirically examines whether a long-run nexus exists between population aging and income inequality. The methodology adopted includes the augmented autoregressive distributed lag (A-ARDL) bounds test. The key results show that aging and income inequality have a long-run relationship among aged and super-aged countries. In contrast, recently graying countries show no evidence of cointegration due to their relatively early transition to aging. Some other control variables also reveal a significant impact on income inequality. Increases in the real gross domestic product per capita worsen the income distribution, but higher government expenditure can help moderate income inequality. In light of rapid population aging, the findings are useful for policy makers in designing and targeting appropriate socioeconomic policies to help mitigate income inequality in the long run based on the intensity of the share of the elderly population in the countries studied.

The agenda of the United Nations sustainable development goals (SDGs) for 2030 has shifted attention from poverty to equality. Unlike poverty, which has declined, inequality has not significantly changed in the past twenty years. Hence, in the absence of a strong fiscal context in which profits are redistributed from governments to their local societies, tax havens are likely to cement inequality in place. In this paper, we study the effects of foreign direct investment (FDI) on income inequality in terms of different indicators using a panel data analysis in 46 countries with a low tax burden over the period 2000–2021. Our results confirm that FDI contributes to mitigating income inequality and improving welfare in the countries studied. This process is likely to be more effective in the presence of a supportive tax framework.