Nigeria, as an import-dependent economy, has seen its inflation rate rise over the years, which might be ascribed to structural causes and imported consumer products. The Autoregressive distributed lag model was used to determine the competitiveness of domestic and foreign prices. In the short run, domestic and international pricing complement each other, but in the long run, they may achieve some level of competitiveness. The currency rate has a considerable and beneficial impact on consumer spending. The result could also be explained by customers' high desire for foreign items.

In this study, we examined the efficiency of cryptocurrencies Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Litecoin (LTC), Ripple (XRP), DASH, EOS, and MONERO from March 1, 2018, to March 1, 2023. We separated the sample into four subperiods for this purpose: a Tranquil period that includes the period from March 1, 2018, to December 31, 2019; a First Wave that includes the year 2020; a Second Wave that includes the year 2021; and a fourth subperiod that includes Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022-2023. The results are mixed, with some cryptocurrencies exhibiting equilibrium and others exhibiting autocorrelation and predictability in their pricing. When the sample is divided into subperiods, most digital currencies have long memories in their returns during the Tranquil period, BTC, LTC, and XRP exhibit efficiency during the First Wave of the pandemic, while BTC, ETH, and MONERO indicate efficiency during the Second Wave. Most assessed digital currencies showed equilibrium by 2022, with the exception of ETH and MONERO, which exhibit long memories, and LTC, which demonstrates anti-persistence. These results hold significance for investors in these alternative markets, as they suggest that some cryptocurrencies may be more predictable and therefore potentially profitable, whereas others may require greater caution and risk management strategies.

Non-compliance with tax obligations, particularly by wealthy taxpayers and large corporations, continues to represent a source of social injustice that fuels social instability, especially in developing countries. Understanding the strategies of tax evasion and avoidance is of critical importance. This article highlights five main strategies used by large corporations and wealthy taxpayers to avoid taxes, including tax havens, the underground economy, aggressive tax optimization, alternative financial markets, and crypto currencies. We also propose several actions to tackle global tax non-compliance, including prevention, peer reporting, active monitoring of compliance indicators and inter- national cooperation. These actions can be combined to achieve optimal results in reducing tax evasion and avoidance.

This paper shows mainly the following results. 1) The debt to GDP ratio cannot diverge to infinity, that is, fiscal collapse is impossible. The necessary condition for this result is that the propensity to consume from the asset is positive. 2) The divergence of the debt to GDP ratio is prevented by inflation when the interest rate on government bonds is considerably higher than the real growth rate, and the inflation rate which is sufficient to prevent divergence of the debt to GDP ratio is smaller than the interest rate on government bonds. Only an inflation rate slightly greater than the difference between the interest rate on government bonds and the sum of the real growth rate and the propensity to consume from the asset is required. This inflation is not caused by policy but occurs naturally.

In the statistical standard of population aging adopted by the United Nations in 1956, the UN only focused on age, which is no longer a good statistical indicator in the context of deepening global population aging. To some extent, population aging is also the embodiment of social progress. This paper suggests improving the existing statistical standards of population aging to better adapt to the reality of social development.

I present a theoretical model and an empirical approach for jointly estimating the effectiveness of fiscal policy and the stochastic process of sovereign interest rate shocks. The theoretical model has features relevant to small open and emerging economies. Interest rate shocks affect the ability of firms to finance payroll expenses. This theoretical feature creates a propagation mechanism for interest rate shocks and affects government spending multipliers. This paper proposes a strategy for jointly estimating government spending multipliers and the interest rate shock process parameters.

The Oswald hypothesis is that home ownership reduces mobility and through that channel results in poorer labor market outcomes. There has been only limited previous evidence on the Australian case. Here we use data from the first four Australian censuses of the twenty-first century, aggregated at the smallest geographical areas for which statistics are released. We propose testing the Oswald hypothesis by estimating the effect of home ownership on the full-time employment rate. Modelling the unemployment rate, as is often done in testing the hypothesis, produces implausible results with respect to the control variables, most likely due to the limitations of the official definition of unemployment. We find that, in modelling the full-time employment rate, the control variables for educational and demographic factors have the theoretically plausible effects, while variables capturing rates for both outright home ownership and with mortgage home ownership are positively related to full-time employment rates, with the effect of the former stronger than the latter. Our findings strongly contradict the Oswald hypothesis.

We propose an open-access innovation index for the U.S. states. This index was built by classifying into four core areas the twelve more important indicators, inputs, and outputs, that are widely accepted in the literature as the most relevant for measuring innovation. We consider the indicators aggregated in the areas of human capital and business environment as the inputs that create knowledge and influence the promotion of innovation, while those in areas of engagement and efficiency as the outputs that are all those outcomes and improvements related to the innovation process. As an example of potential uses of our index, we ran a basic econometric experiment using the economic growth rate as the dependent variable. Despite the results being qualitatively consistent with the literature, we suggest further research using our index and other methodologies. We included in the appendix the overall index score and ranking from 2000 to 2015.

This study documents the relationship between economic freedom and unauthorized immigration to the U.S.A. and tries to answer a still-in-debate question, what motivates people to unauthorizedly migrate? Using the generated instrument variables methodology, and a data panel of 15 countries and 16 years, the endogenous variable is the gap in economic freedom between the country of origin and the U.S., and the dependent variable is the unauthorized immigrant’s growth rate. The results show that for each 10% improvement in economic freedom in the country-of-origin unauthorized immigration decreases around 7%. Estimations are robust even after using other covariates and external instruments. The main conclusion is that economic and social factors play a significant role in shaping migration patterns and that the difference in economic freedom between the country of origin and the U.S. plays a fundamental role in deciding to unauthorizedly migrate

Rental unaffordability is defined as spending more than 30% of a household’s gross income on rent. Post-pandemic inflation and interest rate increases have intensified rental unaffordability. This research examines rental affordability in the U.S., the U.K., and Canada. It also explores the effect of renters’ “affordability knowledge” – defined as the expertise tenants have and use to make economical rental housing choices – on rent expenditure and affordability positioning and compares personal finances, economic perspectives, and demographics based on renters in affordable and unaffordable situations. The results show that nearly two-thirds of the renters studied are in unaffordable rental situations. Interestingly, affordability knowledge was found to reduce rent spent and increase affordability situations. Significant demographic differences were found between those in affordable and unaffordable rental situations, including rent spending, food spending, transportation spending, savings, perceived homeownership likelihood, and age. The research offers important insight into current rental affordability economics, recommendations for policymakers, and opportunities for real estate organizations.

The objectives and tasks of the European Central Bank (ECB) are defined in Articles 2 and 3 of Protocol (No 4) on the Statute of the European System of Central Banks (ESCB) and of the European Central Bank (ECB). While in Article 3,1° of this Protocol other tasks are mentioned, the prime objective of the ESCB and therefore of the ECB, is price stability. This concept was originally specified by the Executive Board of the ECB as an annual increase of less than 2% in the inflation rate over the medium term, measured by the Harmonized Index of Consumer Prices (HICP) for the euro area. This paper examines to what extent the ECB has been effective in realizing price stability over the period from January 1, 2000 to December 31, 2022. Price stability is important for economic agents. It allows them to plan their savings, spending and investment eventually resulting in sustained economic growth.   Notwithstanding the commitment of large human and other resources and the use of unconventional monetary policies, the ECB did not realize its prime objective during a large part of this period. We conclude that putting too much confidence in DSGE-modeling as one of the methodologies to determine monetary policy, may have played an important role in the ECB not achieving its main statutory objective.

The workforce participation rate, and hence the level of employment, for women in Pakistan is among the lowest in South Asia – standing at 25 percent in 2023. Conventional explanations attribute this to poor skills and cultural norms of families and society at large. Empirical work has established that low levels of education, and community attitudes regarding gender roles, hinder women's labor force participation. Ethnographic work suggests that household rules – family culture – on who makes decisions about opportunities for married women to work outside of the home for pay – profoundly impact female employment. This is due to the limited availability of data pertaining to explicit assessments of familial traditions that are pertinent to women's participation in the workforce beyond their domestic sphere. Drawing on data from the Pakistan Social and Living Standards Measurement Survey (PSLM): 2005-2006 – which provides information, from married women, on who in the family decides if they can work – we address this shortcoming in the literature. We find that in families where the decision lies clearly, and exclusively, in the hands of males, married women are 18-19 percent less likely to be employed than if the family culture is for married women – alone – to make this decision. Moreover, this is a much larger deterrent to work than poor education and residential location.

This paper investigates the degree of inflation persistence across regions in Portugal by analyzing the Consumer Price Index (CPI) growth rates for NUTS II regions. The study employs the Augmented Dickey-Fuller (ADF) test to determine whether the CPI data for Portugal is stationary or non-stationary. The results of the ADF test reveal that the IPC data for Portugal is non-stationary, indicating that inflation exhibits persistence in the long run. The study further assesses the persistence of inflation by estimating an autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model for each region. The Ljung-Box test is used to test for autocorrelation in the time series data, and the Hurst exponent is calculated to evaluate the presence of long-term memory in the time series data. The study finds that there is significant autocorrelation in the time series data for all regions, supporting the presence of persistence in inflation at the regional level in Portugal. The Hurst exponent also shows that the time series data for each region exhibits a high degree of persistence in inflation. Finally, the study applies the ARIMA model to each CPI division's data and uses the Ljung-Box test to test for autocorrelation in the time series data. The results show that some CPI divisions exhibited higher levels of persistence compared to others. For example, the "Housing, water, electricity, gas and other fuels" division exhibited high persistence, while the "Communication" division exhibited low persistence. This study contributes to the existing literature by exploring regional inflation persistence in Portugal and its implications for policymaking. The results provide insights into the inflation persistence patterns across regional levels in Portugal, by emphasizing the need to consider regional differences in inflation dynamics when formulating effective policy interventions. Understanding the persistence of inflation is crucial for policymakers to ensure price stability and sustainable economic growth.