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Revisiting China's gradualistic economic approach and financial market
No full textWe develop a model economy with active financial markets, in which the policymaker's adoption of a gradualistic approach is a Bayesian Nash equilibrium. In addition to its financing role, the financial market also creates a channel for information revelation, encouraging the policymaker to take small policy steps. Smaller policy steps lead to more precise information about the productivity shock. Acquiring more information - both on the extensive margin and the intensive margin - provides sufficient incentives for the policymaker to consistently follow the gradualistic approach. This result holds robust for both exogenous and endogenous information models
How Does the Middle-Class Share Affect Growth and Distribution in a Three-Class Economy?
No full textThis study presents a three-class economy model (workers, middle class, and capitalists) and investigates how the middle-class share evolves over time. It also examines the relationship between the middle-class share and economic growth. Depending on the parameters and initial conditions, three different long-run situations arise: (i) an Anti-Dual equilibrium, in which workers and capitalists coexist while the middle class vanishes; (ii) a Pasinetti equilibrium, in which all three classes coexist; and (iii) a Dual equilibrium, in which workers and the middle class coexist while capitalists vanish. An expanding middle-class share either increases or decreases economic growth depending on the conditions
Aid in retreat: The Impact of US and European Aid Cuts on Sub-Saharan Africa
No full textOn 28 March 2025, the Trump administration formally notified Congress of its intent to dismantle nearly all remaining positions within the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), including the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). This decision effectively terminates the operations of a key foreign aid institution, concluding over six decades of purported humanitarian and development engagement. USAID has long been a focal point of criticism for both the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). However, the role of US and European aid in Africa has been fraught with contradictions. While framed as a mechanism for development, such assistance has frequently served geopolitical and neo-colonial interests rather than fostering sustainable, autonomous growth. Under the guise of economic liberalisation, aid has been instrumentalised to impose privatisation and deregulation policies, often to the detriment of local economies. USAID, in concert with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank (WB), has prioritised large-scale agribusiness and monoculture production systems, undermining indigenous food sovereignty and displacing traditional agrarian practices. Consequently, African peasants have become increasingly dependent on imported seeds, chemical fertilisers, and industrial farming techniques, a paradigm that disproportionately benefits Western agribusiness conglomerates while exacerbating food insecurity across the continent. Compounding these challenges, concurrent reductions in aid budgets by the UK and EU, driven by militarisation priorities, threaten to inflict severe humanitarian consequences, particularly upon Africa’s most marginalised populations. Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) stands to bear the brunt of these cuts, as critical prevention initiatives, including condom distribution and pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) programs, face imminent discontinuation. The repercussions could reverse decades of progress, particularly in curbing mother-to-child HIV transmission and reducing paediatric HIV mortality. Yet, this crisis also presents a pivotal opportunity: the potential for Africa to reclaim agency over its developmental trajectory, unshackled from external conditionalities and structural dependencies. This juncture could catalyse an era of self-reliance, marked by regional collaboration, endogenous innovation, and economic sovereignty—principles embodied by initiatives such as the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA). However, the feasibility of such measures remains precarious, given entrenched elite capture and systemic corruption within many SSA governance structures. The subsequent analysis will demonstrate, drawing upon case studies from South Africa, Nigeria, Zambia, and Ethiopia, the political economy of aid withdrawal often renders transformative alternatives unviable, as ruling elites prioritise self-enrichment over structural reform
Geopolitical Instability and Its Ripple Effects On Service Trade
No full textGeopolitical risks affect global economies, particularly the services trade, which makes up 20% of total trade. Understanding these risks is key because they can impact inflation, GDP growth,
the financial sector, and supply chains. The aim of the research is to examine the worldwide pattern of geopolitical risk and its significance on the trade of services, to measure how much global
disputes and risk, as explained in the GPR Index, impact service trade, and to know how strong a regulatory system helps to mitigate the impacts of such threats. The Pseudo-Poisson Maximum
Likelihood is used in the study to assess the adverse impact of geopolitical risks on international service trade using a panel dataset comprising 44 countries from 2011 to 2021. The study finds a negative effect of geopolitical factors on service trade and further finds that an effective regulatory system can reduce the negative impact of such geopolitical disruptions. The results may
assist policymakers in gauging the economic cost of geopolitical risk and in designing policies to neutralise its disruptive potential
Anatomie critique de la gestion des sacs plastiques à Madagascar
No full textThis article examines the governance of plastic bags in Madagascar, highlighting the disjunction between the ecological ambition of the legal framework and the ineffective reality of its enforcement. Despite the adoption of strict regulations since 2015, the country remains entangled in a regulatory maze where overlapping, poorly coordinated decrees generate confusion rather than impact.
Drawing on field observations and institutional analysis, the paper identifies systemic bottlenecks, institutional contradictions, and the fragility of enforcement mechanisms. The plastic ban thus emerges as a revealing case of environmental governance in crisis, caught between symbolic politics and administrative inertia
Logistics Performance and ESG Outcomes: An Empirical Exploration Using IV Panel Models and Machine Learning
No full textThis study investigates the complex relationship between the performance of logistics and Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) performance drawing upon the multi-methodological framework of combining econometric with state-of-the-art machine learning approaches. Employing IV panel data regressions, viz. 2SLS and G2SLS, with data from a balanced panel of 163 countries covering the period from 2007 to 2023, the research thoroughly investigates how the performance of the Logistics Performance Index (LPI) is correlated with a variety of ESG indicators. To enrich the analysis, machine learning models—models based upon regression, viz. Random Forest, k-Nearest Neighbors, Support Vector Machines, Boosting Regression, Decision Tree Regression, and Linear Regressions, and clustering, viz. Density-Based, Neighborhood-Based, and Hierarchical clustering, Fuzzy c-Means, Model Based, and Random Forest—were applied to uncover unknown structures and predict the behaviour of LPI. Empirical evidence suggests that higher improvements in the performance of logistics are systematically correlated with nascent developments in all three dimensions of the environment (E), the social (S), and the governance (G). The evidence from econometrics suggests that higher LPI goes with environmental trade-offs such as higher emissions of greenhouse gases but cleaner air and usage of resources. On the S dimension, better performance in terms of logistics is correlated with better education performance and reducing child labour, but also demonstrates potential problems such as social imbalances. For G, better governance of logistics goes with better governance, voice and public participation, science productivity, and rule of law. Through both regression and cluster methods, each of the respective parts of ESG were analyzed in isolation, allowing to study in-depth how the infrastructure of logistics is interacting with sustainability research goals. Overall, the study emphasizes that while modernization is facilitated by the performance of the infrastructure of logistics, this must go hand in hand with policy intervention to make it socially inclusive, environmentally friendly, and institutionally robust
Bridging Sustainability and Inclusion: Financial Access in the Environmental, Social, and Governance Landscape
No full textThis paper explores the correlation between financial inclusion and the Environment, Social, and Governance (ESG) aspects of sustainable development for a big panel of 103 developing nations over 12 years. Financial inclusion as a measure is taken through the Account Age variable capturing adults having access to formal financial institutions as a percentage. The analysis revolves around the three main ESG pillars each through panel data regressions complemented by instrumental variable (IV) approaches in addressing endogeneity concerns. In the Environment (E) dimension, we find conventional agricultural forms (e.g., extensive agricultural land areas and agriculture value added) as having a negative effect on financial inclusion, but the environmental modernization proxies—renewable energy utilization, food production, climate resilience, and areas under protection—exhibit positive and significant correlations. In the Social (S) dimension, development indicator variables like spending on education, internet penetration, life years at birth, sanitation, and gender equity emerge as strong predictors of higher financial inclusion, and labor market participation is found to have a negative effect, possibly due to the dynamics of employment in the informal sector. The Governance (G) analysis shows positive correlation with controlling corruption and innovation production (applications for patents) as arguments for increased financial access improving institutional transparency and economic ingenuity and a negative correlation with regulatory quality as a concern for capacity gaps in rapidly digitizing economies. Through the means of ESG-matched environmental instruments, this paper presents a unique cross-dimensional approach to sustainable finance and shows through counterfactual analysis under both average and counterfactual distributions that policies supporting financial inclusion can be a path to multiple benefits on the environmental sustainability, social equity, and governance effectiveness axes—key requirements for the success of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in the Global South
Supermarket operating hours and distance to crime
No full textHousehold chores, particularly those related to food—such as meal preparation and grocery shopping—continue to reflect significant gender disparities. Supermarkets, by reducing the distance between consumers and food purchases while leveraging economies of scale to offer affordable and diverse options, are often associated with food security. However, it remains unclear how the establishment of these businesses impacts their surroundings, especially in comparison to other security measures, such as addressing crime.
This study examines how the operating hours and proximity of supermarkets affect local crime levels in Chicago, USA, over a one-year period (September 2023–August 2024). By combining three georeferenced datasets from the Chicago Police Department, Google Maps, and weather information to create a database and applying three negative binomial regression models.
Results indicate that open supermarkets are generally linked to slightly lower crime rates, though this effect fluctuates throughout the day—reducing crime in early hours but increasing it during peak periods. While proximity alone shows no strong correlation with crime, open supermarkets exhibit a localized deterrent effect
The Effects of the Tobacco 21 Minimum Legal Sales Age Policy on Respiratory Health
No full textThis paper examines the effects of tobacco restrictions policy on respiratory health. We leverage the heterogeneous timing across states in the adoption of the policy from a sample of 8,175 individuals between the ages of 18 and 21. Using the 2011 to 2019 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), we estimate the impact of the Tobacco 21 MLSA policy on the prevalence of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), a progressive lung condition marked by airflow obstruction due to prolonged exposure to irritants like cigarette smoke and air pollution. We find that the T21 MLSA policy lowered the risk of COPD by 11.4 percentage points, or approximately 6.7%, among young adults between the ages of 18 and 21. In addition, we find that the policy had a greater effect on male, black, and Hispanic populations. We also find the policy to be more effective among 20-year-old unemployed young adults with some college education. These findings suggest that the T21 MLSA policy has effectively reduced respiratory health problems among teenagers and young adults, supporting its public health benefits to society. Therefore, states that are yet to adopt the T21 MLSA policy should consider its potential to decrease the risk of COPD and, ultimately, tobacco-related mortality as a valuable component of their health policy
Heterogeneous Exposures to Systematic and Idiosyncratic Risk across Crypto Assets: A Divide-and-Conquer Approach
No full textThis paper analyzes realized return behavior across a broad set of crypto assets by estimating heterogeneous exposures to idiosyncratic and systematic risk. A key challenge arises from the latent nature of broader economy-wide risk sources: macro-financial proxies are unavailable at high-frequencies, while the abundance of low-frequency candidates offers limited guidance on empirical relevance. To address this, we develop a two-stage ``divide-and-conquer'' approach. The first stage estimates exposures to high-frequency idiosyncratic and market risk only, using asset-level IV regressions. The second stage identifies latent economy-wide factors by extracting the leading principal component from the model residuals and mapping it to lower-frequency macro-financial uncertainty and sentiment-based indicators via high-dimensional variable selection. Structured patterns of heterogeneity in exposures are uncovered using Mean Group estimators across asset categories. The method is applied to a broad sample of crypto assets, covering more than 80% of total market capitalization. We document short-term mean reversion and significant average exposures to idiosyncratic volatility and illiquidity. Green and DeFi assets are, on average, more exposed to market-level and economy-wide risk than their non-Green and non-DeFi counterparts. By contrast, stablecoins are less exposed to idiosyncratic, market-level, and economy-wide risk factors relative to non-stablecoins. At a conceptual level, our study develops a coherent framework for isolating distinct layers of risk in crypto markets. Empirically, it sheds light on how return sensitivities vary across digital asset categories -- insights that are important for both portfolio design and regulatory oversight