Journal of International Commerce, Economics and Policy

This study examines the complement of financial development, trade openness, political stability and integrating government expenditure on Egyptian economy using time series annual data covering the period 1977 until 2018. This study used the ARDL-ECM estimates to determine the long and short-run cointegration between the series. The estimated results indicated that the financial development enhances growth in the long-run, while the political stability undermined the economic growth in the long-run. Interestingly, we found financial development, trade openness and government expenditure Granger cause economic growth in the short-run, while political stability Granger causes economic growth in both short and long-run; and a similar result with the causal relationship appeared in the strong causal relationship condition. Overall, this study showed that both financial development and trade openness gave evidence of causing growth, but the political stability does not. Thus, the reform policies should continue, while adopting measures to ensure that all the determinants are complementing to growth in Egypt as they are all pivotal and it is imperative for policy analysts to put into perspective when formulating policies as the study captures a novel political stability variable towards growth.

This paper explores the effect of multilateral trade liberalization (MTP) on democracy, using a set of 148 countries over the period 1996–2016. In particular, it investigates whether this effect depends on countries’ level of export product concentration. The analysis shows that MTP promotes democracy only when it reaches a certain threshold. Furthermore, MTP promotes democracy in countries that enjoy a high degree of export product diversification, including away from primary products, or in those with low dependence on natural resource rents. These findings have important policy implications.

This study explored the asymmetric impact of business confidence index (BCI), real effective exchange rate, inflation, the value of trade index and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on inbound business tourism in Japan using the methodology of asymmetric cointegration. The paper uses the nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag (NARDL) bounds test procedure to obtain the long-run cointegrating relationship. The estimated NARDL results show that in the long-run, the negative asymmetric impact of the BCI is stronger than the positive impact. Finally, the study confirms that for the long-run, asymmetric relation exists between tourism, BCI, real effective exchange rate, inflation, GDP and value of trade index.

This paper revisits the issue (dating back to the Brander and Spencer’s approach, 1985) of the well-known inefficiency of the activist regime where Governments set subsidies for their own exporter firms. It is shown that such policies may be efficient (i.e., national social welfares are higher than under free trade) when firms are unionized under the usual Right-to-Manage arrangement and the product is sufficiently differentiated. That is, the emerging Nash equilibrium regime implies a subsidy policy which is Pareto-efficient, removing the unpleasant Prisoner’s Dilemma structure of the standard Brander and Spencer’s result. As an alternative interpretation this result suggests that, in such cases, it is always convenient the unilateral public intervention because welfares will be superior to those under free trade, also in the case of “retaliation” by the rival Government.

In this research, I study the relationship between bilateral Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and difference in corruption between source and host countries. Using instrumental variables (IVs) approach, the results suggest that bilateral FDI between two countries might increase if the difference in corruption between them decreases. In addition, I find that firms from corrupt countries tend to invest abroad to exploit natural resources while those from less corrupt countries take advantage of relatively low local wages and open trade policies.