Narrow Results

This study examined the determinants of foreign bank location decisions in Shanghai markets over the period of 1990 to 2009. The growing foreign presence in Shanghai was found to be related to two different policy regimes: Pudong development area foreign enterprise clustering period after China opened Pudong, and "deposit-loan-match principle" implementing period after China joined WTO. The current location pattern was found to be correlated to deposit potential in each district. It is evident that the foreign bank location decisions were influenced by those of domestic banks while the reverse did not hold. These findings provide a valuable platform for theoretical modeling and further analysis.

The paper empirically examines the nexus between tourism and peace. To do so, it uses in the analysis the recently developed composite Global Peace Index. The sample employed consists of 113 countries and covers the period 2008–2014. The methodology adopted includes PVAR Granger causality tests and impulse response functions. The sample was split into two income groups to allow for the possibility that the nexus differs between developed and developing countries. Findings reported herein indicate a temporary, very short-term adverse effect on tourism as a result of worsening levels of peacefulness only for the former group of countries. A peace promoting effect by tourism is established in the case of the latter group.

The paper empirically examines the redistributive effect of monetary policy and assesses whether financial development plays any role in shaping monetary policy — inequality relations in developing countries. We uncover evidence supporting the redistributive consequences of monetary policy especially in more financially developed countries. We further note that while financial development raises income inequality in countries with low financial development, it leads to a reduction in income inequality in high financial development countries. As a side result, economic growth contributes favorably to income equalization in these countries. Finally, such financial indicators as financial access, financial efficiency and financial stability also condition the impacts of monetary policy on income distribution, although they are independently insignificant. Our results hint that the improvements in information and in efficiency rather than depth and access that would attenuate the negative impacts of contractionary monetary policy on income distribution.

In September 2013, China began to implement a series of policies in tackling severe air pollution. This paper aims to explore the diversity and effectiveness of its air pollution control policies at the city level. A city-level pollution control policy indicator is constructed for 35 Chinese cities during the last two air pollution control action periods from 2014 to 2017 and 2018 to 2020. Additionally, this paper employs the panel vector autoregression model (PVAR) to estimate the impact of air pollution control policies on air pollution reduction. The empirical results show that, in terms of the two main air quality indicators, PM_2.5 and PM₁₀, China’s air pollution control policies have helped improve the air quality over the last several years. The study concludes that air quality improvement should depend on coordinated strategies for controlling various pollutants that involve the collaboration of government and industries.

The relationships between globalization, foreign direct investment (FDI), and exports (trade) have been the subject of in-depth studies leading to mixed and inconclusive results. This study investigates how globalization and FDI influence and affect export, as well as the responsiveness of exports to globalization shocks in the West African ECOWAS region over the period 1980–2014. To investigate these phenomena, the study uses Panel VAR, cointegration methods and long-run estimation methods to estimate the short-run, cointegration and long-run relationships, as well as the responsiveness of export shocks due to economic globalization and FDI. The Panel VAR and Granger causality test results showed that there is a positive and significant effect as well as a causal relationship between economic globalization, non-export GDP, and short-term exports. Further, the study also shows that there is no significant effect and no causal relationship between FDI and exports in the short-run, but, FDI has a positive and significant relationship with export in the long-run in the ECOWAS region. The cointegration and long-run analysis showed the existence of cointegration and a long-run relationship between exports and the regressors included in this study.