Narrow Results

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has been a subject of considerable debate since its inception. Existing assessments of BRI’s implementation have often concentrated on economic or political aspects in isolation, which does not provide a comprehensive evaluation of the initiative. This paper employs a multi-dimensional approach to analyze the potential influencing factors, encompassing economic, political, military and geopolitical dimensions, from the perspectives of neoliberalism and neoclassical realism. In this study, we evaluate the effectiveness of BRI based on the case of Angola. The findings suggest that BRI has been highly effective in stimulating economic growth, while its impacts on politics, military, and geopolitics have been relatively limited. Although current research has not corroborated the hypothesis that China is pursuing shared prosperity, it is evident that China is following a distinct path from the United States’ quest for hegemony. The available evidence indicates that this path is moving toward the pursuit of shared prosperity.

This paper provides some evidence about the impact open data has in the economic landscape, and therefore, contributes to the limited evidence in this subject. From a panel data corresponding to the period of 2014–2017 and a sample of 27 open data leader countries, the incidence of open data on the economic field is examined. The dependent variable, economic impact, is a latent variable based on innovation and doing business indicators. Results obtained show there is a significant and positive effect of open data, ICT development and income per capita on the economic impact.

Cities in the United States can expect to be affected by proposed stringent stormwater treatment plans and standards set to be triggered by existing Federal policy-making requirements. In Los Angeles, these standards require three levels of treatment of all stormwater before it is discharged into a public body of water. This work presents a methodology for conceptual cost budgeting for these new required treatments, and describes methodologies and cost modeling tools needed for assessment of city and regional economic impacts associated with construction and operation of these plants. The research is case-study-based, and presents nine different cost analysis scenarios based on different strategies for determination of rainfall, locations of plants, and size of plants.

The cost and size of the new collection and treatment facilities increases substantially if they are designed to accommodate a larger share of expected annual rain events. It will cost about six times more to build a system that can treat storm flows from 97% of the region's annual average storm days than it would to build to a 70% standard. This additional cost achieves about nine additional days of storm flow coverage. In addition, if stormwater treatment facilities are financed locally and constructed over a twenty-year period, most communities in the greater Los Angeles area would experience very significant employment and net economic losses.

The internationalization of the portfolio company is a key strategy used by private equity (PE) investors to create value and produce returns. In recent years, the focus on the strategies for value-creation through operational improvement has become essential to achieve the exponential growth required to the portfolio company, given the low multiples and the market risk of leverage. In this paper, we define the key types of contribution that a PE investor can provide in order to support the internationalization process and their effects on the portfolio company’s performance. The research is based on a survey administered to 47 PE fund managers, which covers 156 deals involving Italian companies. The results offer insight into the contribution to the corporate governance, strategy and management that PE provides in addition to the monetary support. The findings show that the non-financial support given to the portfolio companies has a positive impact on the performance and that the most impactful contribution the PE can give is the support to the relational network when the company strategy involves a foreign direct investment.

Estimating the potential economic impacts of drought is increasingly prominent in policy discussions on resilience to future population and climate changes. We develop a scenario-based analytical framework for estimating the economic impacts of droughts under a range of assumed climate and policy conditions. The scenarios modeled take account of different assumptions regarding a drought event, including: the source of the drought (green or blue water), temporality, and critically, long-term and short-term policy-making choices. Applying the framework to the UK economy we estimate that, depending on the severity of the drought event and short-term policy choices, the impacts could range from 0.35% to 4.3% of total output in terms of total production. Different long-term policy choices could mitigate the impacts for drought events with similar severity and duration.

Severe flooding events often cause significant damage to an area, including affecting the local economy, disrupting transportation, and damaging infrastructure. While raw statistics offer some understanding of crop and property-related damages, resulting from large-scale floods, we also need to consider the longer-term impacts and recovery within an area and the interaction between adjacent areas during the recovery process. In this paper, we examine the impacts of major and minor flood events on business employment and the number of establishments in different sectors of the economy. While we find that flood events had a negative short-run impact on agricultural services and particularly small establishments, estimations show positive impacts in the service sector. We also identify significant spatial spillovers.

This paper aims to evaluate the economic implications of meteorological drought in Spain. The study seeks to provide decision-makers with crucial insights into the macroeconomic effects of drought, enabling them to devise mitigation strategies and minimize its impact on economic activity. The Partial Hypothetical Extraction Method (HEM) is employed within the Input-Output analysis framework extended to a Social Accounting Matrix (SAM) of Spain to achieve this goal. The database utilized for this analysis is the FNAM for Spain in 2017, in millions of euros, obtained from the Full International and Global Accounts for Research in Input-Output Analysis (FIGARO) project, a collaboration between Eurostat and the European Commission. The study aims to estimate the economic impact of drought on the productive sectors of the Spanish economy in terms of sectoral production and GDP. This involves simulating the partial reduction in value-added resulting from variations in average water productivity per gross value added, based on the drought indicator SPI-24. Three scenarios are generated: (1) drought, (2) moderate drought and (3) severe drought. In quantitative terms, the simulated drought scenarios could lead to a drop in GDP of 0.88% for the drought scenario, 1.61% for the moderate drought scenario, and 1.76% for the severe drought scenario. Additionally, it is important to recognize that water scarcity hampers the social and economic development of cities and regions beyond the results in quantitative terms.

The paper uses 2018 data to construct a numerical general equilibrium model containing 26 economies, and adds global value chain and added-value trade into the structure, and systematically simulates the economic effects of China’s response to three scenarios of nine categories of CPTPP policy selection. In line with the simulation results, under the four scenarios in which China takes unilateral measures to deal with the impact of CPTPP, the policy effectiveness from high to low separately includes: the construction of China–Japan–Korea free-trade agreement, the entry into force of RCEP and the further opening-up. In the two scenarios in which China joins the CPTPP, the effect of joining the agreement with the first batch of expansion countries is better, while the effect of joining the CPTPP later is slightly worse. After the United States returned to CPTPP, China chose three scenarios in which the economic effects, from high to low, were to optimize the business environment, take no measures and join CPTPP with the United States. Among the three different options, the economic benefit of China’s active choice to join CPTPP is the best. Second is the effect of China’s unilateral measures on CPTPP. However, once the United States returns to CPTPP, it will bring adverse impact on China. The effective measure to deal with it is to optimize the business environment to reduce the cost of the trade.

COVID-19 highlighted the fragility of the sectors and the economies, tested by lockdowns and quarantines. This chapter aims to provide a comprehensive analysis of the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak on the Brunei Darussalam economy and its key sectors. Further, it explores the policy responses undertaken and their impact to control the COVID-19 transmission within Brunei. This analysis identifies the social and economic policy responses to COVID-19 and summarises the invaluable lessons learnt in the context of businesses, sectors, and the economy. It is observed that Brunei economy had a positive growth during the pandemic due to its effort to enhance economic diversification to overcome the challenges faced by high dependence on the oil and gas sector. It facilitated the growth of agriculture, forestry, and fisheries sectors, wholesale and retail sectors, communication sector, and non-oil and gas sector despite the restrictions of the pandemic. The outbreak underscored the opportunity for businesses, sectors, and government to prioritise dynamic policies to facilitate and operationalise new growth prospects, which were among the reasons for the growth of Brunei amidst the COVID-19.

The death care industry satisfies the ritualistic and technical needs associated with human death, providing ceremonial services such as the tribute, the disposition of remains, and memorialization (Industry Focus: Death Care, 2016). However, although from a technical point-of-view and according to the Basel Convention, human remains are nothing but a type of hazardous anatomical waste, sociocultural factors affect the availability of choice between separate specific disposal options (Technical Guidelines on the Environmentally Sound Management of Biomedical and Healthcare Wastes, 2003) that drive social, ecological, and economic costs.

In this study, the General Equilibrium Analysis system for Environment (GREAT-E) is applied to analyze the effects on macro-economy, carbon emission, income distribution, sectoral production, trade structure and factor demand through five different tax rates of carbon tax charge scenarios. The simulation results show that the imposition of carbon tax is of limited impact on China's macro-economy, in which the reduction in GDP can be made within the affordable range. Relatively, the emission reduction effect of the imposition of carbon tax on CO2 is much greater than its negative effect on the economic development. It suggests that imposing carbon taxes can lead to important shifts in production, consumption, value added, and trade patterns. However, Introducing carbon tax can significantly affect income distribution, which will result in negative effects in residential welfare improvement. In order to reduce negative impacts of carbon tax, it is suggested to raise the tax rate step by step and follow the principle of tax neutrality. The government can reduce the adverse impact in the imposition of carbon tax by such means as to relieve the value added tax or to provide subsidies to the vulnerable groups.