Digitalization is nowadays one of the fastest developing processes. The adoption of digital technologies can provide innumerous opportunities for the organizations to evolve and gain competitive advantage by leveraging of technologies to respond to dynamic expectations and demands. Information about the country digitalization level is essential to decision makers in both public and private organizations. It can present insights on which areas need the most investment, and furthermore to gain feedback on the outcomes of these investments. For companies, it can create a certain predictability on which products and services will be required the most. To assess the evolution of this process in different countries, various indexes were proposed and employed by different corporations. The Digital Economy and Society Index (DESI) and ICT Development Index (IDI) are used by public organizations. Digitalization Index (DiGiX) and Cisco Digital Readiness Index (CISCO) are used by private companies. Comparing two sectors highlights the most common factors of digital evaluation. Indexes are analyzed thoroughly by their structure, coverage, weights, methodology and ranking. The result of the practical work is a equivalence table which shows the percentage of their similarity. Additionally, a new digitalization index is proposed, based on the result of the previous comparison, which can be applied to analyze both public and private sector of the country’s digitalization level.

Many of Keynes´s ideas and concepts are proven correct in this paper. The demand side, mainly business investments, drives the economy. Business firms steer the business cycle via profit expectations and animal spirits. Injections to and withdrawals from the circular flow of income are multiplied throughout the economy in accordance with Keynes´s multiplier. A sudden and sharp rise in households´ saving rates has a detrimental effect on aggregate demand, in line with Keynes´s paradox of thrift. Finance, not saving in the S=I sense, is the necessary condition for business investments and economic growth to be realized. Keynes´s finance motive thus makes money endogenous, contradicting the textbook result that exogenous money steers aggregate demand, contradicting the mainstream loanable funds theory and putting into question the Keynesian theory of sticky prices as a condition for real growth. However, a crucial omission in Keynes´s productive writings is the lack of an accelerator tying income to investment. Some of his followers such as Paul Samuelson tried to remedy that by developing multiplier-accelerator models. The problem with them is that the accelerator lacks micro foundations, in specific disregarding business confidence. Linking macro accounting identities with empirical national accounts data for five major economies produces the finding that business firms explain more than all aggregate expenditure growth during a 25-year period. Thus, it is concluded that business confidence is the root of the business cycle. Making the accelerator account for business confidence casts new light on the perhaps most well-known Keynesian “truth”: active fiscal policy as a main force stabilizing the business cycle. With business confidence being the endogenous and ubiquitous variable driving the business cycle, it turns out that any exogenous factor has the possibility to affect it. Policy needs to be viewed as a competing factor to the factor(s) driving the cycle in the other, destabilizing direction. The more powerful those factors are (e.g., a deadly virus), the tougher it gets for policy to “win” the competition, turning business confidence around. This leads up to the paper´s main conclusion: the worse the economy, the stronger is the case for active fiscal policy, but the lesser is the chance for it to succeed.

In this paper, a portfolio analysis is carried out using the Sharpe ratio to identify the optimal market portfolio. The measure of investment performance with a Sharpe ratio is compared to results obtained with bootstrapped resamples of the Sharpe ratio. The results indicate that the choice of the market portfolio is highly affected by the uncertainty regarding the estimation of the expected returns and the variance-covariance matrix between the returns, that is, the estimation risk associated with these parameters.

The development of digital economy is becoming an important path to promote the kinetic energy of China's tax revenue development. Based on the panel data from 2011 to 2018, this paper uses Gini coefficient to analyze the regional differences of China's digital economy, and uses fixed effect model, spatial Durbin model, multi-period double difference model and other empirical methods to examine the tax effects of digital economy development. The results show that the regional disparity is the main reason for the regional disparity of digital economy development in China. The development of digital economy directly increases the tax amount of local digital industry, and at the same time it also radiates and drives the increase of local total tax revenue; The tax effect of digital economy has a negative spatial spillover, showing a "siphon effect" to neighboring areas; Mechanism analysis shows that the development of digital economy mainly promotes the increase of local tax revenue through growth effect.

In the past, investing in housing has served as an engine of growth for many economies as it is widely recognized that poor housing conditions can have significant negative impacts on human health, education, and economic opportunities. To assess the housing-related quality of life, indicators such as housing quality, housing environment, and cost burdens can be applied. However, recent studies indicate that materials used for construction are critical. Permanent materials, as opposed to temporary materials, typically offer a range of benefits in terms of durability, low maintenance, improved energy efficiency, increased property value, and better safety. The ultimate aim is to identify the key drivers of housing conditions in Cambodia, with a particular focus on materials and water quality, and the legal status of housing. To find the empirical relationship between economic, socio-economic, and demographic variables on the one hand, and variables measuring housing and living conditions in Cambodia on the other, the analysis employs Ordinary Least Squares and Methods-of-Moments regression modeling. Results indicate that high employment rates and entrepreneurship increase home ownership, and improve the quality of drinking water available. Furthermore, in addition to employment and entrepreneurship, the higher-performing construction materials can also be empirically explained by a bigger labor force and variables capturing the wider macroeconomic environment.

Influenced by traditional notions of solidarity, when a province’s planning can be highly aligned with that of the central government, the province is perceived to be more collective and thus able to receive financial or resource favors from the central government. This consistency, as is often the case, reflected in doing the same thing as the central government. This situation may lead governors to ignore local economic performance and thus reduce regional innovation efficiency, as in the case of China’s Great Leap Forward. Likewise, it is possible to get better resources (energy or capital) by demonstrating managerial submissiveness, thus improving the regional innovation efficiency. Therefore, to verify the relationship between imitative governance and regional innovation efficiency, we collected relevant data from 31 major provincial administrative units in China, calculated the degree of imitative governance between provincial government work reports and central government work reports through text similarity, as well as utilized the SBM-DEA model to evaluate regional innovation efficiency. Meanwhile, we provide a new explanation of the phenomenon from the perspective of resource inclination. Finally, the empirical results show that imitative governance promotes local innovation efficiency and is moderated by resource inclination.

This paper examines whether sell-side analyst-affiliated investors trade stocks before their analysts release material information. Using class action lawsuits, I explore the pre-lawsuit periods and investigate how potentially informed analysts trade their covered firms. The event study finds that analyst-affiliated investors reduce their stockholdings of firms prior to their own analyst downgrades. The findings are more pronounced among investors employed by investment banks. The post-trading performance of analyst-affiliated investors suggests that they have superior information and front-run to maximize benefits.

Speeding up digital development and building "digital China" is an important strategic deployment of the "14th Five-Year Plan" and a concrete measure to promote the high-quality development of China's sports industry and national health. Based on provincial data in China from 2011 to 2019, an empirical model is used to analyze the relationship between digital construction, sports industry development and national health investment. The results show that digitalization is instrumental for sports industry development and the improvement of national health in China. Digitalization has promoted the healthy development of sports industry and national health by increasing the input of public science and technology.

Based on the empirical data of 6110 listed export companies in China from 2010 to 2019, this paper studies the impact of China's economic policy uncertainty (EPU) index on the profitability of listed companies from the specific perspective of export companies, and analyzes the moderating effects of different factors on this impact. The results show that China's EPU index has a significant negative impact on the profitability of listed export companies, and the increase in R&D investment and wage returns will aggravate this negative impact. In addition, listed export enterprises with different enterprise characteristics have different responses to EPU. State-owned enterprises and enterprises located in coastal areas are relatively less negatively affected by EPU.

The objective of this research is to investigate, using time series data ranging from 1992 to 2021, the effects of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and foreign direct investment (FDI) on economic growth (GDP) in India. The stationarity of the data was examined by employing unit root tests, and an autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) technique was used to investigate the link between the factors, taking both the long- and the short-run into consideration. According to the findings, an increase of one percent in both ICT and FDI will result in an increase of 0.56% and 0.71% in GDP over the long term, in addition to an increase of 0.11% and 0.29% over the short term. The findings of the investigation are of particular significance to policymakers because they can be utilized to establish sensible policymaking for long-term economic success, in addition to advancing the ICT sector and boosting FDI.

Investment funds are increasingly focusing on ESG issues, seeking to contribute to improving environmental, social, and governance concerns. ESG-focused investing involves promoting good ESG performance and may result in a decrease in expected financial returns. This may lead to a conflict between solely profit-focused shareholders and ESG-focused investors, who may respond accordingly. As such, a firm's ESG commitment may trigger several events that can affect the stock price. A firm's ESG commitment may increase its stock price; however, the end of such commitment may also positively affect the stock price. Hedge funds may consider this in their activism which may reshape the way hedge funds target firms and influence their actions accordingly.

Based on provincial panel data from 1998-2018, this paper estimates research and development (R&D) factors, and a stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) model is constructed to examine the effects of R&D factors on regional total factor productivity (TFP). The results show that both R&D capital stock and R&D personnel can significantly promote regional TFP, but the productivity-enhancing effect of R&D factors is different between regions. Specifically, R&D capital and R&D personnel can promote TFP in eastern and central provinces, and the promotion effect is not significant in western provinces. In addition, compared with investment-driven regions, innovation-driven regions are more likely to enhance TFP by R&D factors.

This study investigates the impact of financial inclusion on environmental sustainability in 178 emerging and developing countries from 1996 to 2022. Employing a composite index derived through Principal Component Analysis (PCA) as a measure of financial inclusion and covering four aspects (access, depth, efficiency, stability), our analysis reveals negative outcomes. The findings indicate that enhancing financial inclusion is associated with a notable increase in CO2 per capita emissions as well as in Total Greenhouse Gas emissions. We demonstrate that controlling corruption improves environmental quality, yet this measure alone is insufficient to fully mitigate the impact of financial inclusion, as indicated by our moderation analysis. The same analysis, however, shows that fostering globalization through trade openness is an efficient tool to alleviate the positive effect of financial inclusion on the quality of the environment. The study employs various policies targeting the control of development levels, energy consumption, natural resource utilization, industry, and urban population dynamics to contextualize the influence of financial inclusion on environmental sustainability. Through econometric methods and a comprehensive examination of the specified time frame, our results provide insights into the complex interplay between financial inclusion and environmental outcomes in diverse socio-economic contexts. The research contributes to the discourse on sustainable development by highlighting the potential of certain factors as a catalyst for environmental improvement. Understanding these dynamics is crucial for policymakers, as it underlines the trade-off between integrating inclusive financial strategies and achieving environmentally sustainable development trajectories in emerging and developing nations. Moreover, shedding light on the underlying mechanisms, such as trade-offs, fills a significant gap in the literature.

We study analytically the conflict of goals between stabilizing economic activity and public debt sustainability, for the fiscal authorities. In the short run, an active and expansionary fiscal policy, increasing public investment or reducing the labor taxation rate, is growth enhancing. However, as these short term fiscal policies also decrease government revenue and increase the public debt, budgetary and fiscal multipliers are reduced in the long run. In the framework of a potential ZLB constraint for monetary policy, an expansionary fiscal policy is thus appropriate only if long term labor and consumption taxation rates are small, and if the share of public expenditure in GDP is high. On the contrary, fiscal policy should be contractionary, in order to insure the sustainability of the long term public debt, if long term labor and consumption taxation rates are high. A contractionary fiscal policy is then also all the more appropriate as the sensitivity of government expenditure to the public debt is high, and as the labor share in the production function is high.

Foreign direct investment (FDI) is widely viewed as a key driving force behind China’s exceptional growth performance in the last four decades. This paper investigates several questions posed by China’s success in capturing gains from FDI. What explains that success? Can other countries replicate it, or is it unique to China? What lessons are from China for other countries? China indeed has advantages in attracting FDI such as huge market and cheap labor, the well-designed policy and strategy, however, seem to play more important role in the successful story. Our empirical estimates support on four hypotheses: FDI and GDP growth in China positively interact each other; FDI is helpful to China’s technological progress, FDI promotes China’s industrial development, and FDI stimulates China’s manufactured exports.

Liquidity can be a real phenomenon for execution of the financial holding. Its risk falls in debate to impose a conditional cost on the counterparty. The time-varying liquidity is often linked to the expected fundamental value of an investment. In this work, the microblogging-based informed transaction is examined as a determinant of the liquidity-facilitating cost. Most importantly, this study investigates the economic blockade era and post-pandemic uncertainty. The sentiment indicators were found to be determinants of liquidity. These findings were consistent in the post-pandemic period. However, the investor pessimistic sentiment was a priced risk factor in liquidity during the economic blockade period. Based on the Bayesian theorem, a relativeness was reported between sentiment indicators and the liquidity-facilitating cost. The same findings were depicted in environments of the pandemic era. Nevertheless, the posterior probability indicated an occurrence of the liquidity-associated cost in response to the pessimistic sentiments during the economic blockade period. This quantification may have potential implications in terms of exploring liquidity from the microblogging perceptive.

This paper examines the impact of COVID-19 on Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) deposits across 13 African nations from 2016 to 2022, using a seven-year dataset and Ordinary Least Squares estimator. Notably, it uncovers a significant positive link between the pandemic and SMEs deposits, indicating heightened reserves amidst economic uncertainty, potentially driven by risk mitigation or government support. Associations between gross domestic product (GDP), inflation, unemployment, foreign direct investment (FDI), exchange rates, and SMEs deposits were evident, showcasing higher GDP aligning with increased deposits, while inflation and unemployment linked to reduced ones. FDI showed a positive influence, and exchange rate fluctuations notably affected SMEs deposits, especially for those in international trade. These findings emphasize policy reconsideration for crisis strategies supporting SMEs reserves during uncertainty and interventions addressing inflation, unemployment, and exchange rate risks. Future research exploring regional nuances and global comparisons could further enrich policymaking for resilient SMEs amid evolving economic landscapes.

By an endogenous growth model with a two-period overlapping generations structure, I examine the existence of a budget deficit in an economy that endogenously grows by investments of firms. The consumers leave bequests to their descendants and hold money as a part of their savings. I use a Barro-type utility function, where people include the utility of their children in their own utility. The main results are as follows. 1) A budget deficit is necessary for full employment under constant prices. 2) Inflation is induced if the actual budget deficit is greater than the value at which full employment is achieved under constant prices. 3) If the actual budget deficit is smaller than the value which is necessary and sufficient for full employment under constant prices, a recession occurs. Therefore, a balanced budget cannot achieve full employment under constant prices. I do not assume that the budget deficit must later be made up by a budget surplus. I use a Barro-type utility function to prove the necessity (or inevitability) of a budget deficit instead of the neutrality of government debt. In the appendix of this paper, I show that if money, as well as goods, are produced by capital and labor, a budget deficit is not necessary for full employment under constant prices.

The expansion of urban infrastructure is an important indicator of agglomeration and a major factor in the deterioration of the urban environment. The investment in urban infrastructure is accompanied by the sealing of ground. The implementation of effective policies to reduce the practice of sealing ground is impeded by the existence of conflicting interests and fiscal disincentives. A significant challenge is the dearth of policy-relevant information. Conventional analysis considers urban outcome indicators in proportion to population and neglects non-linear distribution patterns, thus obscuring global regularities that contain important information. The study contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of urban imperviousness through the lens of urban scaling. The present study employs Germany as a case study to examine the extent to which the parameters of the scaling function differ between two types of cities. District Affiliated Cities (DACs) and Administrative City Districts (ACDs), which are afforded greater fiscal autonomy. The analysis indicates that the amount of sealed land exhibited a notable increase between 2006 and 2018 in the ACDs. Calibration of the scaling functions for cities with the actual coefficient of the DAC control estimate and a global orientation exponent (5/6) resulted in a 16% reduction of sealed ground. In conclusion, urban scaling laws offer a valuable tool for analyzing the complex dynamics of urban imperviousness and its control costs, thereby contributing to the formulation of more effective urban policies and planning.

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.