The Unassuming Economist

From a paper by Enoch Quaye, Fred A. Yamoah, Pratyush K. Patro, and Adolf Acquaye:

“Research indicates that some countries have achieved decoupling between economic activity
and environmental damage, even considering consumption. We question whether emissions
reductions from decoupling sufficiently mitigate climate change to meet Sustainable
Development Goal 13: Climate Action. A novel approach is used to model latent information in
GDP growth rates to predict country-level sustainable carbon emission rates. We propose a
latent variable model for the growth rate of the CO2 emissions-to-GDP ratio to understand the
dynamics needed to achieve sustainable carbon thresholds for the Net Zero target. We document
that while the unconditional average GDP per capita growth trends upward, the belief in
its persistence is declining. The parameter linking consumption-based emissions with GDP per
capita growth is statistically significant. It indicates a downward trend and confirms that economies
can grow without a proportional increase in emissions as technology advances and people
alter their behaviour. The findings highlight the importance of policies and technological innovation
in decoupling economic growth from consumption emissions. Furthermore, the latent
variable (which is easy to learn) persists and barely changes during the estimation period 2010
to 2018. We observe a decline between 2015 and 2018, despite remaining high overall.”

From a paper by Thanh Nguyen, Son Nghiem, and Anh-Tuan Doan:

“The convergence tests showed no overall convergence but revealed convergence clubs for each factor. Granger causality tests indicated short-run bi-directional relationships between the variables. Long-run panel regression analysis confirmed that technological progress significantly improves per capita income and energy diversification. Additionally, it revealed bi-directional relationships between energy diversification and financial development, a uni-directional relationship from financial development to per capita income and a U-shaped effect of per capita income on energy diversification, with a turning point at $67,112.8 per year.”

From a paper by Roshnay R. Britz, Adefemi A. Obalade, and Anthanasius F. Tita:

“The Russia-Ukraine invasion presents one of the most trending news in 2022. Economies having solid ties with Russia are exposed to the contagion effects of the crisis. The South African economy is strongly linked to Russia via international trade and the Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) alliance. This study investigates the impact of the Russia-Ukraine invasion on daily and monthly commodity prices in South Africa for the 2015-2023 period. The study applies descriptive statistics, dummy regression model and sub-period analysis to evaluate wheat prices, oil prices and inflation rate before and during the Russia-Ukraine invasion. The descriptive analysis and regression results indicate an increase in wheat prices, oil prices and inflation rates during the post-invasion period compared to the pre-invasion period. This implies a significant impact of the Russia-Ukraine invasion on these economic indicators in South Africa. Policy implications of the findings are highlighted in the concluding section.”

From a paper by Mohamed Ben Omar Ndiaye, Ebrima K Ceesay, and Yahaya M Moussa:

“In the theoretical literature, the relationship between primary producer commodity prices and economic change has been confirmed. Therefore, this paper examines sub-Saharan African countries’ experiences pertaining to commodity price variation. The main purpose of this article is to examine the impact of commodity price instability in sub-Saharan Africa. To do so, panel data models are used to solve the problems of unobserved variables. The results reveal that the current growth of commodity prices has a positive effect on the growth of the economy. However, the logs of the lags and logs of the leads of the commodity price have negative impacts on the growth of the economy. That means that commodity price variations will continue to harm the economies of sub-Saharan African countries.”

From a paper by Huan Huu Nguyen, Nam Anh Tran Nguyen and Phuong Thao Le Thi:

“This study uses public emotions shown through social media to identify public sentiment toward the current Russia-Ukraine war. Utilizing the development of natural language processing algorithms, this study tests the correlation between the public psychological factor and the fluctuation in financial markets and energy prices during the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war. This study emphasizes the public’s initial response to this event (from 1/2022 to 5/2022). It aims to evaluate the public sentiment on sudden shock instead of taking the incident comprehensively. The study results ascertain the public sentiment index contained from social media as a market indicator. During shock events such as the Russia-Ukraine war, public sentiment intensifies energy and financial asset price fluctuation, indicating that public psychology tends to be influenced by negative news and causes them to act accordingly, resulting in a sell-off in financial and energy markets.”